Soldiers battle heavy fog in China quake helicopter hunt
DUJIANGYAN, China (AFP) — 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.
More than 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 aboard, state media reported.
Another 6,000 rescue workers have been added 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.
A top official said the military would not rest until the helicopter was found.
"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 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, because the water level was rising slower than expected.
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.
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 body of water is just one of about three dozen "quake lakes" created by the 8.0-magnitude tremor, and authorities 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, Xinhua quoted the county's education bureau chief as saying.
The government also took steps apparently aimed at countering rising anger over the deaths of thousands of schoolchildren in school collapses.
Police and soldiers on Tuesday blocked access by residents and journalists to the ruins of the Juyuan Middle School near the city of Dujiangyan, where hundreds of students were believed to have been buried.
"The scene is no longer open. We cannot say why. Please understand," a police officer there told AFP.
Residents said police told them the restriction was aimed at "protecting" the site, where distraught parents had come regularly to mourn their children.
"But we think it also is because they don't want people to get too angry and protest," one resident, a woman who gave only her surname, Gao, told AFP.
AFP reporters saw similar restrictions at other destroyed school sites.
The health ministry earlier sought to ease fears of disease outbreaks, saying bodies had been sterilised and buried well so they would not contaminate water sources.
Meanwhile, large areas of China could face blackouts in the coming months in part due to last month's earthquake, which damaged several hydropower dams and curtailed coal mining, Xinhua reported.
