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CHENGDU, China : More than 10,000 troops battled heavy fog Tuesday as they tried to find a crashed helicopter in China's rugged quake zone, where authorities were also monitoring a dangerously swollen lake.
Nearly 70 hours after the crash, there was no sign of the Mi-171 chopper from the People's Liberation Army or the five crew members and 14 injured quake survivors who had been on board, state media reported.
Another 6,000 rescue workers have been to the 4,000 already involved in the search for the missing helicopter, concentrated in densely forested mountains divided by narrow canyons, according to the China Daily.
"Some of the canyons are 200 to 300 metres (660 to 980 feet) wide and more than 100 metres deep and are like wells," said Cheng Qingxin, a pilot with the army's General Staff Headquarters.
The paper quoted another pilot saying clouds and mist made navigating the quake area in southwest China's mountainous Sichuan province extremely hard, since "you can't see the next mountain while flying over one".
"The current priority is to search (for) the helicopter and the people on board by any means," Guo Boxiong, vice chairman of the powerful Central Military Commission, told an emergency meeting, Xinhua news agency reported.
The pilot of the crashed chopper, 51-year-old Qiu Guanghua, is from the Qiang minority.
He was one of the first ethnic minority pilots to be selected for training in 1974, and was to have retired in 10 months, according to the China Daily.
The death toll from the May 12 quake, China's worst for a generation, rose to 69,019, the government said Monday, with another 18,627 missing.
Meanwhile, millions of people watched Tuesday to see if strenuous work had been successful to defuse a ticking time bomb in the form of a vast reservoir, Tangjiashan lake, created when a river was blocked in the quake.
Regular and paramilitary soldiers had been toiling round the clock to dig a channel to divert water and prevent it from overflowing, threatening more than a million people downstream.
However, rescue workers were not expected to drain water from the lake until Thursday, two days later than planned initially, the China Daily reported.
The reason was that the rise in the water level in the lake was gradually slowing down, according to the paper.
In the 24 hours until noon Monday, the water level rose 1.2 metres (four feet), down from daily increases of up to two metres last week.
Experts said the build-up in the water level was likely to continue to slow because only moderate rain was expected in the coming days.
Soldiers had set up seven monitoring posts around the lake to have constant, real-time information about changes in the water level, the paper said.
About 200,000 people have already been evacuated from the most dangerous areas below the lake, and drills have been going on for days for the more than one million others who may have to flee if the worst happens.
The Tangjiashan lake is just one of about three dozen "quake lakes" created by the 8.0-magnitude tremor, and people throughout the region are monitoring as the others swell.
While the post-quake clear-up goes on, the first school in Wenchuan county -- at the epicentre of the quake -- reopened Monday in temporary buildings to serve more than 500 children.
However, some 14,000 children still have no place to study, the county's education bureau chief was quoted as saying by Xinihua.
Also Monday, the health ministry sought to ease fears of disease outbreaks, saying bodies had been sterilised and buried well so they would not contaminate water sources.
- AFP /ls
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