China says dam "structurally stable and safe" after quake
Posted: 15 May 2008 0302 hrs

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BEIJING: A dam near the epicentre of a powerful earthquake that hit southwest China is "structurally stable and safe", officials told state media on Wednesday, denying earlier reports of dangerous cracks.

Foreign media reports quoting Chinese state media had said that 2,000 soldiers had rushed to repair Zipingpu dam, which is upriver from the quake-hit city of Dujiangyan, due to "extremely dangerous" cracks that had appeared after the quake.

Dujiangyan is about 50 kilometres away from Wenchuan, the epicentre of the 7.9-magnitude quake that hit the southwestern province of Sichuan on Monday afternoon.

"After the earthquake happened in Wenchuan, Sichuan, there were rumours saying there were cracks in the dam," a manager at the Zipingpu Development Company was quoted saying by state Xinhua news agency.

"But after the quake, experts from the Ministry of Water Resources made a thorough examination of the important parts of the dam and made a scientific assessment, and they ruled that the dam is structurally stable and safe," he said, without directly ruling out there were cracks.

A separate, later Xinhua report said a ship-lifting facility at the Three Gorges Dam had been suspended on Monday after the quake but was resumed the next day and no other problems at the site were found.

The dam, the biggest hydro-electrical project in the world, is in Hubei province, about 1,000 kilometres from the epicentre of the quake.

There were suggestions that the government might be censoring some online content about the Zipingpu dam.

When the words "Zipingpu" and "troops" were typed into a Chinese search engine earlier on Wednesday evening, a message came up saying "the content of your search might have violated national rules and regulations."

The foreign media reports about the troops being rushed to the dam could not be found in Chinese on the Internet.

But a later search on the Internet using the same words brought up search results, although none related to cracks in the dam. - AFP/de