(AFP) – May 27, 2008

CHENGDU, China (AFP) — China pressed on Wednesday with frantic efforts to drain water from a huge "quake lake" threatening millions of people, as survivors of this month's devastating tremor braced for more aftershocks.

Rescue workers had evacuated 158,000 people in the most imminent danger from a breaching of the lake, which was created when landslides blocked a river in the May 12 earthquake that devastated huge tracts of Sichuan province.

The disaster has left nearly 88,000 people dead or missing, while 15 million others have been displaced.

Although the Tangjiashan lake is little more than a fortnight old, it is already holding enough water to fill 50,000 Olympic swimming pools and could cause immense damage if it overflowed.

Premier Wen Jiabao told a meeting of the Cabinet's quake relief headquarters Tuesday that handling this and three dozen other "quake lakes" in China's tremor-hit southwest was the "most pressing" task, the China Daily reported.

One of Wen's deputies, Vice Premier Hui Liangyu, confirmed the huge importance attached to the task after visiting the site on Tuesday.

"It is threatening millions of lives in the area downstream and any negligence will cause new disasters to people who have already suffered the quake," he said, according to the state-run Xinhua news agency Wednesday.

But the sense of urgency appeared not to have seeped down completely to grassroots' levels, with one official complaining local governments did not take the risk seriously enough.

"The speed of evacuation is somewhat slow," a local water resources official told AFP.

"Sometimes local governments think that evacuation is too much trouble, and they're betting it won't really be necessary, because they're not sure how big the risk might be," he said.

Water in the Tangjiashan lake is rising two metres (6.6 feet) every day and by Tuesday it was only 23 metres from the lowest level of the barrier, the China Daily said, citing Cai Qihua, a local water management official.

More than 600 engineers and soldiers were at the lake working non-stop to dig a diversion channel, but they would not be able to complete the task until June 5, according to the China Daily.

Up to 1.3 million people will have to be relocated if the lake barrier is breached, and officials have already started preparing for that contingency, it said.

The village of Tianlin, among the first that would be flooded if the barrier bursts, was one of several communities holding evacuation drills Tuesday, the paper reported.

People went through the village banging gongs and giving instructions via loudspeakers, directing the 680 residents to seek higher ground in 20 minutes -- the time they will have to save themselves in the worst-case scenario.

The May 12 earthquake, which measured 8.0 on the Richter scale, flattened entire towns and villages across an area of mountainous Sichuan the size of South Korea.

The death toll from the disaster has reached 68,109, with another 19,851 people missing, a government spokesman said on Wednesday.

The quake has also affected China's cultural heritage, causing minor damage to seven of the famed 2,200-year-old terracotta warriors in the northern city of Xian, the Beijing News daily said Wednesday.

Another relic severely damaged was the 2000-year-old Erwang Temple, in the same area as the UNESCO World Heritage-listed Dujiangyan irrigation system, Xinhua reported.

The quake damaged 1,645 cultural relics in Sichuan province alone, including 148 regarded as precious, Xinhua said

Heightening the sense of fear still stalking China's southwestern Sichuan province, a strong aftershock measuring 5.4 on the Richter scale rattled the area Tuesday.

Xinhua said 420,000 houses had collapsed in Sichuan's Qingchuan county as a result of the aftershocks and 63 people there had been injured, six critically.

However, officials said Wednesday they did not expect the national economy to take a major hit from the quake.

"Sichuan only accounts for four percent of China's overall gross domestic product," said Mu Hong, deputy director of the National Development and Reform Commission, the nation's top economic planning agency.

"The area severely impacted by the quake accounts for less than one percent. So the impact on the national economy will be there, but it will indeed be limited," he told a briefing in Beijing.

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