> The Chinese Saga of Olympics Shame Turns to Fear -- After the Shock of
> an Earthquake, Thousands Now Huddle in Fear of a Flood
>
> The New York Times
>
> May 30, 2008
>
> After the Shock of an Earthquake, Thousands Now Huddle in Fear of a Flood
>
> By ANDREW JACOBS
>
> QINGLIAN, China — It is a simple strand of red plastic hanging between
> two trees, but for residents of this battered town, it is the line
> between life and potential death.
>
> On one side are 11,000 residents who have been huddling under plastic
> sheets since the May 12 earthquake devastated northern Sichuan Province.
> On the other is a lush plain of farmland and homes that government
> officials say will be washed away should a swollen reservoir of trapped
> river water break through the wall of rock, dirt and trees that holds it
> in place.
>
> Soldiers stand sentinel on roads leading to the flood plain, which
> includes much of this picturesque town, blocking residents eager to till
> their fields or salvage clothing from their quake-damaged homes.
>
> “It’s for their own good,” said Bian Dedi, 43, who was patrolling the
> deserted downtown on Thursday and shooing away the few residents who had
> slipped through the cordon. “In an instant, everything you see would be
> under water.”
>
> For the past four days, a phalanx of earth-moving machines and soldiers
> has been struggling to complete a 300-yard sluice that would relieve
> pressure on a lake growing behind a landslide dam on the Jian River.
>
> On Thursday, the lake, given the name Tangjiashan, rose another 5 feet,
> about 70 feet from the top of the barrier, and officials warned it might
> take another day or two before the drainage canal was complete.
>
> Even then, the surge of water from the drainage canal itself will cause
> significant flooding, especially along the heavily populated Chengdu
> basin. On Friday, officials began moving another 30,000 people to higher
> ground in anticipation of the channel’s completion.
>
> For the 1.3 million people living downstream, the looming threat is
> adding to the misery of coping with a disaster that has killed a
> confirmed 68,858 people, with 87,000 injured. Officials say 18,618 more
> are missing and presumed dead.
>
> By Saturday, 197,000 people will have been relocated from low-lying
> towns and villages and the government has set in place an ambitious
> evacuation plan that would send in total more than a million people
> dashing to higher ground should the dam break.
>
> If the dam fails, experts say, it is likely to begin in a burst.
>
> “Once that process starts, it’s virtually impossible to do anything to
> decrease the water,” Alexander Densmore, a seismologist at Durham
> University in Britain, told Reuters. “When they fail, they tend to fail
> catastrophically.”
>
> Here in Qinglian, a tourist town that straddles the Jian River shortly
> after it descends the mountains, residents have been forced to
> disassemble and rebuild their bamboo-and-plastic shelters five times in
> the past two weeks. Each move coincided with the worrisome expansion of
> the impounded lake, which is 30 miles upstream.
>
> “I may be old, but I can still run if I have to,” said Chen Biqi, 70, a
> farmer who has been told to hike up a nearby knoll should the dam burst.
>
> Compared with the terror of an earthquake, many people here view the
> potential peril of flooding as an annoyance, just one more indignation
> meted out by nature. Most people expressed confidence that the
> government’s evacuation plan would keep them from harm’s way.
>
> “Earthquakes are unpredictable but at least we would have some warning
> if a flood is coming,” said Cheng Huayuan, 65, a retired factory worker
> who was among thousands of people camped out in Mianyang, a city of
> 600,000 that stretches out along both sides of the Fu River, a tributary
> of the Jian.
>
> Like many of her neighbors, Ms. Cheng had a home to return to, but she
> said she was too unnerved by the constant aftershocks to sleep in her
> eighth-floor apartment. “You never know if the next tremor will bring
> the building down,” she said. “A flood we can handle.”
>
> Not everyone is so confident. At Mianyang’s bus station for
> long-distance trips, thousands of people clamored for seats on buses
> headed to other cities on Thursday. Hundreds of others sought shelter
> atop a forested hill a mile outside the city.
>
> Even though she is only a half-hour walk to the safety of the mountains,
> Deng Huilan, 45, said she often spent nights nodding off in a chair. “I
> don’t dare fall into a deep sleep,” said Ms. Deng, who is sharing a tent
> with a dozen family members, including her 80-year-old parents. “None of
> us can swim.”
>
> Across the region, emergency-relief officials have created 50 evacuation
> routes and everyone, they say, is within two miles of higher ground.
> Some mountain towns would have little warning should the dam break, but
> in Mianyang, the second-largest city in Sichuan, residents would have
> three hours to scurry to safety.
>
> Engineers have dubbed the scheme to build the canal “the one-third
> plan,” because the channel would drain about a third of the lake’s
> water. While not catastrophic, the flood of water from the canal would
> be 42 feet high, about 10 feet higher than the banks of the river in
> Mianyang, according to an official with the city’s information office
> who would only give his surname, Pu.
>
> To get the word out, the authorities have outfitted a squadron of cars
> and trucks with loudspeakers. “People have plenty of time to move,” Tan
> Li, the party secretary of Mianyang’s earthquake relief center, told the
> China News Agency.
>
> The nation has been fixated by the military’s battle against Tangjiashan
> Lake, much of it broadcast on state-run television, and the obstacles.
> On Thursday, rain grounded the army’s fleet of supply helicopters,
> forcing 1,000 soldiers to clamber along two miles of treacherous rock
> slides to bring fuel to the bulldozers. By the end of the day, engineers
> said the 50-foot-wide canal was more than a third complete.
>
> Although attention has largely focused on Tangjiashan, 34 other
> so-called quake lakes have formed within the steep ravines that stretch
> north to the Tibetan plateau.
>
> A rock slide that blocked the Huang River has forced the 140 residents
> of tiny Huangzhang to live inside a nearby school that sits far above
> the river.
>
> “We wish the dam would break already so we could fix our homes,” said Wu
> Xianchen, 48, a farmer who ventured back into his shattered house to
> fetch a thermos as rain soaked his furniture. “We’re tired of all these
> disasters.”
>
> In Qinglian, a stray dog pawed the ruins, and swallows swooped through
> an empty downtown that once teemed with tourists drawn by the town’s
> association with the poet Li Bai, who was born here 1,300 years ago. Two
> farmers suddenly emerged, baskets of produce bouncing on their backs.
>
> One of the men, Hong Daozhi, 63, bragged that he had figured out a way
> to sneak around the roadblocks. Spring onions and peanuts are begging to
> be picked, he said, and the window for planting corn is quickly closing.
> Asked if he was worried about getting caught in a flood, he held his
> muddy hands up to the sky, let out a loud laugh and then disappeared
> behind a pile of rubble.
>
> Huang Yuanxi contributed research from Chengdu. Jing Zhang contributed
> research from Beijing.