China starts to evacuate up to 70,000 from quake zone
Posted: 16 June 2008 1121 hrs

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BEIJING: Up to 70,000 people living in the epicentre of last month's China earthquake began emergency evacuations due to the risk of landslides from heavy rain, state press said on Monday.

The quake victims began evacuating from the township of Wenchuan on Sunday due to fears of rock and mud slides in the mountainous region brought on by torrential rains, the Beijing News reported.

"Wenchuan has already entered the rainy season and the rain will weaken even more the already brittle mountainsides, making the situation even worse," the paper said.

Local officials contacted by AFP on Monday were not immediately available for comment.

Wenchuan was at the epicentre of the May 12 earthquake that devastated parts of Sichuan province, leaving up to 87,000 people dead or missing and up to five million homeless.

The township was severely damaged during the quake with early rescue and relief efforts mostly flown in due to impassable roads in the mountainous area.

According to local weather reports, the Wenchuan region was expecting thunderstorms and showers for the next three days.

In China as a whole, massive rains have left at least 57 people dead and eight missing across nine provinces over the past 10 days, the government said.

More than 1.27 million people have been evacuated in the hardest-hit areas, with large swathes of farmland submerged and economic losses already totalling to more than 10 billion yuan (1.4 billion dollars), it said.

Rising waters on China's major rivers prompted the government to issue emergency orders on Sunday as the affected provinces and regions scrambled to prepare for more torrential rains.

"We must fully deploy flood prevention and control work on the Yangtze and Pearl rivers," E Jingping, head of the state's flood prevention headquarters, said in an emergency order posted on its website.

The situation on the Pearl river in southern China's Guangdong and Guangxi provinces was the most pressing with water levels at a 20-year high, E said.

On a tributary of the Pearl in Guangxi, they had surpassed warning levels by 6.8 metres (22 feet), he said.

Waters on a Yangtze river tributary in central China's Henan province were up to 4.7 metres over warning levels, he said in transcripts of the meeting posted on the headquarters website on Monday.

Almost 18 million people had been affected by flooding while more than 141,000 homes had been wrecked or damaged, the government said.

Rains were expected to further pound southern China in the coming days, with rising river levels threatening towns in Jiangxi, Guangxi and Guangdong provinces, the state meteorological bureau said.


- AFP/so