The New Nation - Internet Edition

AFP, Qinglian

Over a million people living below China's dangerous "quake lake" were warned to prepare for the worst as the enormous body of water kept rising on Thursday to near bursting levels. "We must prepare for dealing with the worst-case scenario but strive for the best results," said Water Resources Minister Chen Lei, as two weeks of preparations were about to be put to the test.

The lake was created in the May 12 earthquake when a landslide blocked the Jianjiang river, and the water masses have been building up steadily since then.

The lake has become one of the most pressing issues in the aftermath of the disaster in southwest China's mountainous Sichuan province, which killed more than 69,000 people and left millions of others homeless.

The mud and rock dam was in danger of collapsing under the pressure of the mounting body of water, and seepage was already occurring, the official Xinhua news agency said, quoting a spokesman for the "lake control headquarters".

Now officials were pinning their hopes on a channel dug by soldiers last week and designed to drain at least enough water to contain the lake.

An estimated 1.3 million people live in areas that could be inundated if the plan does not work, and many were preparing mentally for having to leave.

"If it's not one thing it's the other. If it's not the earthquake, it's the flood. But if they order us to go, we'll go," said Liao Guangmei, a 60-year-old woman in Mianyang, a city threatened by the lake.

Around Mianyang, storefronts had been sealed and protected with sandbags as stripes of red paint sprayed on trees at a height of about one metre (three feet) indicated where the water would reach if the lake were to burst.

On a road leading to the town of Qinglian, near the lake, a kilometre-long (0.6-mile-long) line of army trucks was parked, many of them loaded with olive green fibreglass boats, others with portable bridges.

Inside Qinglian, row after row of three- to four-storey apartment buildings were abandoned, while the entrances to the communities had been sealed off with police tape. Amid the ongoing woes, the president of the International Red Cross said China would need up to 10 years to fully overcome the disaster.

"Of course, the challenges are very enormous and dealing with them will be a heavy task for many years," said Juan Manuel Suarez del Toro Rivero, who is touring the quake zone.

"In our experience after an earthquake you need another five to 10 years of work," he told AFP.

The death toll from China's 8.0-magnitude earthquake rose to 69,127 on Thursday, with another 17,918 missing, the government said on Thursday.

In Hanwang town, also in the quake zone, more than 14,000 people were to be evacuated, as they were exposed to landslides and mudflows, according to Xinhua.

Following the announcement, people who had been living in tent camps since they lost their homes in the earthquake were preparing to relocate once again.

"The government says we have to move, because there could be landslides from aftershocks and heavy rain, so it is not safe to stay here anymore," Xu Shifeng told AFP on Thursday as she was taking down her government-issued tent.

But another woman from the Hanwang tent camps, who gave her surname as Li, said she was not going anywhere.

"We already had enough trouble, and I think we are too far away from the mountain," she said, gesturing towards a mountainside behind the city scarred by recent landslides.

An aftershock with a magnitude of 5.3 on Thursday jolted Sichuan's Qingchuan county, the US Geological Survey said. The China Earthquake Administration said the aftershock measured 5.0 on the Richter scale.

Two other aftershocks measuring 4.2 and 4.0 on the Richter scale also rocked Qingchuan in the early hours of Thursday, the China Earthquake Administration said.