China has evacuated more than 150,000 people living below a swollen lake formed by this month's devastating earthquake amid fears it could burst and trigger massive flooding, state media said today.
And Tokyo's Jiji news agency said China had called on Japan to send its military to help with relief operations.
The Tangjiashan lake was created when landslides caused by the May 12th earthquake blocked the Jianjiang river above the town and county of Beichuan in mountainous Sichuan province, near the epicentre of China's most destructive earthquake in decades.
The official death toll from the 7.9 magnitude quake is already more than 67,000 and is certain to rise further, with nearly 21,000 listed as missing. The quake injured nearly 362,000 people and new aftershocks toppled 420,000 houses, many already uninhabitable, on Tuesday.
Downstream from the lake, residents were evacuated overnight as engineers dug a diversion channel to prevent flooding.
The water level in the lake, one of 35 "quake lakes" formed by the tremor and holding the volume of about 50,000 Olympic-size swimming pools, has kept rising and the giant sluice would not be ready for another week, the
China Dailyquoted experts as saying.
Immediately below the lake, the river runs in a loop between flattened high- and low-rise buildings, but threatens communities downstream which held evacuation drills on Tuesday.
Beijing has allocated 200 million yuan ($29 million) to Sichuan especially for defusing the threat of the quake lakes, 28 of which were still rated as dangerous, Xinhua news agency said.
It also urged Japan to send its military to help with rescue operations, Jiji said, in what would be the first time Japan's military has been deployed in China since the end of World War Two.
Jiji quoted an unnamed Foreign Ministry official as saying that Japan had started to consider the request, while Kyodo news agency said China had sounded out Tokyo about sending military planes to help transport relief materials.
Sino-Japanese ties, long troubled by Japan's brutal occupation of parts of China from 1931-45, have been on the mend in recent months.
In Tianlin village, among the first to be flooded if the lake bursts, gongs and loudspeakers directed 680 villagers to rush to surrounding hills within 20 minutes.
The lake water level was 727.09 metres on Tuesday, only 24.21 metres below the lowest part of the unstable landslip barrier.
The region along the faultline is densely packed with dams, raising concerns that if either the quake lakes or the weakened dams burst, the rush of water could cause other dams to fail.