• Substantial progress made in race to drain 'quake lake'
• Official spokesman denies report of 1.3 million evacuation
• Investigator pinpoints poor design in school collapse
  

Japan cancels plan for military aid flightMIANYANG (China) - CHINESE troops racing to drain a swelling 'earthquake lake' made progress digging a diversion channel and officials sought to assure residents that no mass evacuation of a nearby city was planned.

The landslide-blocked river at Tangjiashan in southwest China's Sichuan province is now the most pressing danger after an earthquake devastated the region on May 12.

The official death toll from the quake is 68,858 and is sure to rise with 18,618 missing. Aftershocks have toppled 420,000 houses, most already uninhabitable, and there is worry that landslide-blocked rivers could bring more havoc.

But Mr Zhou Hua, a Mianyang city official who is spokesman for the lake relief effort, said the report was inaccurate.

'There is a virtual training exercise scheduled for tomorrow to test our contingency plan to move that many people,' he said. 'But there is no public participation, and we see no reason at all to actually implement the plan at this stage.'

Mianyang, a city of 5.3 million people including many in rural areas, has a concentration of high-tech businesses.

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 in the mountainous province of Sichuan, an official spokesman said on Friday.

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

Xinhua news agency said the water level was nearly 23 metres below the lowest point of the barrier, which experts have said could give way quickly once breached. Troops have also built escape paths in the event that happens, Xinhua said.

A Chinese meteorological authority official, Zhai Panmao, said the authority did not expect unusually heavy rain in the area in the next 10 days.

'We've adopted extremely important measures and are opening up a breach and so on,' he said. 'We have full confidence in solving this problem.'

Post-quake reconstruction work has only just begun, and tens of thousands of survivors are now threatened by more than 30 quake lakes, formed by landslides, that could break through the natural dams, flooding downstream towns and reservoirs.

Japan had shelved plans for its military to fly tents and blankets to China, a Japanese government official said on Friday, after messages on Chinese Internet sites recalled war time atrocities by Japanese troops.

Children
Meanwhile, an official investigator pinpointed the poor design and construction of at least one of the many schools that collapsed during the quake, killing thousands of children.

Domestic media reports compiled put the combined toll from deaths of children and teachers in the rubble of schools at more than 9,000. The Chinese public has been outraged by the disproportionate number.

An official investigator said one the schools that crumpled, the Juyuan Middle School, where hundreds of children died, was fatally weakened by poor design and materials.

'There were certainly problems with site selection, the building's structure and structural features, the construction and materials,' Chen Baosheng, an expert from Tongji University in Shanghai, told the Southern Weekend.

The number of prospective orphans in the quake area has dropped dramatically as more children were reunited with their parents, Xinhua quoted local officials as saying.

There were about 1,000 'unclaimed children' in Sichuan as of Wednesday, down from more than 8,000 immediately after the earthquake, Xinhua said, adding civil affairs authorities had been overwhelmed by calls seeking to adopt those quake orphans. -- REUTERS