On Jun 4, 8:49 am, rst0wxyz
yahoo.com> wrote:> Hey!!! Wacky Wrong, let's go to Sichuan and tour the earthquake area
> for ourself.
>
> On Jun 4, 8:43 am, Micky Wong wrote:
>
>
>
>> 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.
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