Dam Alert!
Danger of dam in earth quake zone.
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From the NYT
China says troops rush to plug dangerous cracks in dam
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By AUDRA ANG, Associated Press Writer 1 hour, 41 minutes ago
HANWANG, China - Thousands of Chinese soldiers rushed on Wednesday to repair
a dam badly cracked by the country's massive earthquake, while rescuers arrived
for the first time in the epicenter of the disaster.
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China's top economic planning body said that the quake had damaged 391 mostly
small dams. It left "extremely dangerous" cracks in the Zipingpu Dam upriver
from the earthquake-hit city of Dujiangyan and some 2,000 soldiers were sent to
repair the damage, the official Xinhua News Agency said.
Xinhua said Dujiangyan would be "swamped" if major problems emerged at the
dam.
He Biao, the director of the Aba Disaster Relief headquarters in northern
Sichuan province, said there were also concerns over dams closer to the
epicenter.
"Currently, the most dangerous problems are several reservoirs near
Wenchuan," he said, according to a transcript on the CCTV Web site.
"There are already serious problems with the Tulong Reservoir on the Min
River. It may collapse. If that happens, it would affect several power plants
below and be extremely dangerous," he said.
Rescuers who hiked in to the epicenter scoured flattened mountain villages
for thousands of missing and buried victims, and the death toll of nearly
15,000 appeared likely to soar far higher.
Help also began to arrive helicopter in some of the hardest-to-reach areas,
where some victims trapped for more than two days under collapsed buildings
were still being pulled out alive. But the enormous scale of the devastation
meant that resources were stretched thin, and makeshift aid stations and
refugee centers were springing up over the disaster area the size of Belgium.
Leveled hospitals forced doctors and nurses to treat survivors in the street.
Helicopters dropped food and medicine to isolated towns. Mourners burned money
before rows of bodies, believing their lost relatives could use it in the
afterlife.
Xinhua quoted government officials as saying rescuers who hiked Wednesday
into the city of Yingxiu in Wenchuan county the epicenter of the quake
found only 2,300 survivors in the town of about 10,000, with another 1,000
badly hurt.
The official death toll rose Wednesday to 14,866, Xinhua said, but it was not
immediately clear if that number included the 7,700 reported dead in Yingxiu.
In Sichuan province alone, another 25,788 people were buried and 1,405 were
missing, provincial vice governor Li Chengyun said, according to Xinhua.
Twelve Americans were found safe near the epicenter of the quake.
A spokeswoman for the World Wildlife Fund said the 12 members of the wildlife
group were reached by satellite phone earlier in the day. The team was near the
world's most famous panda preserve in Wolong, whose pandas were reported safe
Tuesday.
Unlike previous natural disasters in China, official media have reported
prominently on the quake and state TV canceled regular programming to run
24-hour coverage.
Scenes of destruction and death have been shown, along with prominent focus
on Premier Wen Jiabao, who rushed Monday to Sichuan to oversee the rescue work.
He has been shown crawling into collapsed buildings to urge survivors to hang
on with impassioned pleas, and seen reassuring children who had lost parents.
Wen was there when one 3-year-old girl trapped for more than 40 hours under
the bodies of her parents was pulled to safety Wednesday in Beichuan region,
Xinhua said.
Rescuers found Song Xinyi on Tuesday morning, but were unable to pull her out
right away due to fears the debris above her would collapse. She was fed and
shielded from the rain until rescuers extricated her from the rubble.
Elsewhere, a 34-year-old woman who was eight months pregnant was rescued
after spending 50 hours under debris in Dujiangyan. "It's a miracle brought
about by us all working together," said Sun Guoli, fire chief of the nearby
provincial capital Chengdu, who supervised the rescue. The show of official
empathy was aimed at reassuring the public about the government's response and
also showing the world the country is ready to host the Beijing Olympics in
August. Wednesday's leg of the Olympic torch relay in the southeastern city of
Ruijin began with a minute of silence. President Hu Jintao presided over an
emergency meeting of the Communist Party's highest body Wednesday, the second
such meeting since the quake happened. Hu, also secretary-general of the party,
urged the military, police and others to rush to the disaster area to help.
The death toll from the quake was expected to rise when rescuers reach other
towns in Wenchuan county that remained cut off. "The
Communist Party Central Committee has not forgotten this place," Wen said
after flying by helicopter to Wenchuan, adding that some 50 injured people had
been airlifted from the area. Relief efforts were aided in their third day by
the clearing of storms that had prevented flights over some of the worst-hit
towns. Military helicopters seen flying north over Dujiangyan, and Xinhua said
some had airdropped food, drinking water and medicine to Yingxiu. East of the
epicenter in the town of Hanwang, the smell of incense hung over a crowd of
sobbing relatives who walked among some 60 bodies wrapped in plastic, some
covered with tributes of branches or flowers. Nearby, rescuers carried more
bodies out of a makeshift morgue at the Dongqi sports arena. People from the
town and surrounding areas packed into blue tents provided by relief officials.
A Western-style clock tower in the town center had stopped at 2:27 the time
the quake hit. The Mianzhu No. 3 Hospital was
obliterated, and the seven-story main Hanwang Hospital collapsed. Surviving
medical staff set up a triage center in the driveway of a tire factory, but
could only provide basic care. "The first day hundreds of kids died when a
school collapsed. The rest who came in had serious injuries. There was so
little we could do for them," said Zhao Xiaoli, a nurse at Hanwang Hospital.
Emergency vehicle sirens sounded every few minutes. An ambulance drove in,
delivering a man pulled from the rubble and covered in dust. "There will be a
lot more people. So many still haven't been found," said Zhao. Disorienting
episodes added to the struggle for survival in much of the disaster zone. The
Mianyang city government ordered its 700,000 residents to evacuate all
buildings between 4 p.m. and 6 p.m. because an aftershock was predicted. In
Chengdu, water to some parts of the city was cut for repairs, touching off a
rumor that the supply was contaminated. People began hoarding water
and water pressure citywide dropped before a senior official went on TV to
deny anything was wrong.
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