Chinese battle quake lake amid official confusion

By Tyra Dempster

MIANYANG, China (Reuters) - China's struggle to overcome earthquake devastation has been compounded by conflicting official claims about plans to evacuate 1.3 million people in a city threatened by a swelling "quake lake".

Facing outrage from grieving parents, the government, meanwhile, vowed to punish anyone responsible for school buildings that collapsed in the quake, killing thousands of children.

The landslide-blocked river at Tangjiashan in southwest China's Sichuan province is the most pressing danger after the magnitude 7.9 quake struck on May 12.

The official death toll is 68,858 and is sure to rise with 18,618 missing, and there is widespread worry that more than 30 landslide-blocked rivers could burst and bring havoc to downstream towns and tent camps.

The state Xinhua news agency said Tan Li, Communist Party chief of Mianyang in the quake zone, ordered 1.3 million people downstream from Tangjiashan to "evacuate to higher ground".

But Zhou Hua, a Mianyang official who is a spokesman for the lake relief effort, told Reuters that report was "mistaken".

"There is a virtual training exercise scheduled for tomorrow to test our contingency plan to move that many people," he said.

"The exercise will test the command system from the top to the very bottom with community teams, but it's a government internal exercise that won't mobilize the public....Don't confuse practice with a real emergency. This is not."

Xinhua's Chinese-language service also said it was a training exercise. But the service's later English-language report appeared adamant that more than training was afoot.

"The mass evacuation, dubbed a 'drill' by local government officials, is said to make way for a possible flood discharging operation set for the weekend," Xinhua said.

In villages outside Mianyang city there were no immediate signs of either mass panic or exodus.

"The government and the army are working on it and won't let it burst," said Jin Dongsheng, a farmer in Qingyi town near the city. He and about 3,000 town residents had been moved about half an hour's walk uphill from homes close the river bank.

RECONSTRUCTION

At the unstable Tangjiashan lake, hundreds of troops have removed more than a third of the earth for a channel intended to ease pressure from the rising waters, Zhou said.

Up to 190,000 residents downstream had moved to higher ground, usually hillsides close to where they were living before, to avoid a surge if the blockage suddenly gave way, he said.