It Just Gets Worse…

MIANYANG, China – Chinese officials rushed Tuesday to evacuate another 80,000 people in the path of potential floodwaters building up behind a quake-spawned dam as soldiers carved a channel to try to drain away the threat.
The official Xinhua News Agency reported emergency workers would try to complete the evacuation by midnight Tuesday, taking the number of people moved out of the threatened valley to almost 160,000, from more than 30 townships.
The Tangjiashan lake in northern Sichuan province, formed when a massive landslide blocked a river, is one of dozens of fragile dams created during the earthquake that pose a new destructive threat in the disaster zone.
Soldiers hauled explosives through the mountains to reach the area, and the official Chinese Daily said Tuesday on its Web site they were “preparing to dynamite the barrier.” State television showed live footage of heavy earth-moving equipment being used to carve out a 200-yard channel to drain the water.
The lake is swelling behind a landslide near Beichuan, one of the towns hit hardest by the May 12 tremor that devastated Sichuan.
Residents of Huangshi village said they were told to move to a government-built tent camp on a hillside overlooking the river near Jiangyou town, southeast of Beichuan, to avoid the potential flood.
“We were told that so far it is the safest place for us to stay if the dam of the lake crashes,” villager Liu Yuhua said Tuesday. “But we will have to move further uphill if the situation turns out to be worse.”