China "quake lake" fears force new evacuation

BEICHUAN, China (Reuters) - China has evacuated more than150,000 people living below a swollen lake formed by thismonth's devastating earthquake amid fears it could burst andtrigger massive flooding, state media said on Wednesday.

Japan's military will also fly tents and blankets to Chinaafter Beijing asked for help, Kyodo news agency said.

The Tangjiashan lake was created when landslides caused bythe May 12 quake blocked the Jianjiang river above the town andcounty of Beichuan in mountainous Sichuan province, near theepicentre of China's most destructive earthquake in decades.

The official death toll from the 7.9 magnitude quake isalready more than 68,000 and is certain to rise further, withnearly 20,000 listed as missing. Aftershocks on Tuesday toppled420,000 houses, many already uninhabitable.

China's request to Japan, which Tokyo said it wasconsidering, would mark the first time Japan's military hasbeen deployed in China since the end of World War Two andunderscores the huge challenge the country is facing torebuild.

Sino-Japanese ties, long troubled by Japan's brutaloccupation of parts of China from 1931-45, have been on themend in recent months and Japan sent rescue teams and a medicalteam to Sichuan province shortly after the May 12 quake.

Chinese President Hu Jintao told a group of visitingTaiwanese politicians that relief efforts were proving hard.

"The quake's massive destruction, huge casualties and theextremely difficult relief work are all very rare in history,"Hu said. "It has caused great losses to human lives andproperty. We are deeply saddened."

The government has also reduced import taxes to zero onvaccines, antibiotics and the blood product antiserum, theFinance Ministry said.

As it struggles to provide relief to the stricken region,authorities were also trying to stave off further disaster fromits unstable dams and reservoirs.

Downstream from the Tangjiashan lake, residents wereevacuated overnight as engineers dug a diversion channel toprevent flooding.

Up to 1.3 million people could be relocated if the lakebarrier collapses entirely, the China Daily said in its onlineedition.

In Taihong, resident Han Haiyun, 60, was lucky to be awayfrom her house when a landslide demolished her village.

"I would never have thought something like this couldhappen in my life," she said. "It's impossible to put intowords."

The water level in the lake, one of 35 "quake lakes" formedby the tremor and holding the volume of about 50,000Olympic-size swimming pools, has kept rising and the giantsluice would not be ready for another week, the China Dailyquoted experts as saying.

Over the last century, about 5,500 people have been killedby flash floods when barrier lakes burst through dams made bylandslides, according to a 2004 paper by geologists at theChinese Academy of Sciences.

In 1786, the breach of a landslide dam 10 days after amajor earthquake killed about 100,000 people in Sichuan.

The region along the faultline is densely packed with dams,raising concerns that if either the quake lakes or the weakeneddams burst, the rush of water could cause others to fail.

ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES

The earthquake will also make it difficult for China tomeet its target of limiting inflation this year, a seniorofficial said, because of the damage to agricultural productionand heavy investment in reconstruction work.

"At present it's very hard to say concretely how manypercentage points of pressure will be exerted, but there isdefinitely pressure," said Xu Xianchun, deputy head of theNational Bureau of Statistics.

Meeting the country's 2008 inflation target of 4.8 percentwould be "very hard", he said.

But Mu Hong, a vice-chairman of the National Developmentand Reform Commission, China's top economic planning agency,said the earthquake would have a serious impact on the economyof the disaster-hit regions though barely weigh on nationalgrowth.

"According to our research, the quake has had only a verylimited impact on economic fundamentals," he told a newsconference.

Beijing has allocated 200 million yuan (14.7 millionpounds) to Sichuan especially for defusing the threat of thequake lakes, 28 of which were still rated as dangerous, Xinhuanews agency said.

The country also released about 4,400 tonnes of edible oiland more than 15,000 tonnes of grain from its reserves to helpmaintain supplies and price stability in affected areas, theNational Development and Reform Commission said.

A massive relief effort, which involves providing food,tents and clothing for millions and the reconstruction ofhousing and infrastructure, is expected to take up to threeyears.

(Writing by Nick Macfie and Lindsay Beck; Additionalreporting by Beijing bureau, and Teruaki Ueno and IsabelReynolds in Tokyo; Editing by Jeremy Laurence)