Flood fears ease after thousands evacuate

updated 11:41 p.m. ET May 17, 2008

DONGHEKOU, China - Rescue work resumed Sunday in Sichuan province after survivors of a massive earthquake spent a jittery night worried that blocked rivers would flood their already devastated towns.

Two rivers backed up by landslides had threatened to flood the towns, sending thousands of people fleeing in a region still staggering from the country's worst disaster in 30 years.

The official Xinhua News Agency said a man was found alive after being trapped for 139 hours in a collapsed hospital in Beichuan. Xinhua said Sunday that the man, Tang Xiong, "was only slightly bruised" when he was pulled to safety.

But the government fears the death toll from last Monday's magnitude 7.9 quake will surpass 50,000.

A mountain sheared off by the quake blocked the Qingzhu river and swallowed the village of Donghekou whole, entombing an unknown number of people inside a huge mound of earth.

An official said Sunday the flooding danger had eased.

"The river levels have dropped," said a government official at the disaster command post in nearby Qingchuan, in the northern part of Sichuan province. He refused to give his name.

Frightened residents had streamed out of the entire county on the northern edge of the quake zone, spurred by mobile phone text messages sent en masse by local government officials warning that the water level was rising and people downstream were being evacuated.

In the town of Beichuan, 60 miles to the south, thousands fled as the reports circulated.

The swift exodus underscored the jitters that persist. A strong aftershock — the second in two days and measured by the U.S. Geological Survey at magnitude 5.7 — shook the area early Sunday for 45 seconds, causing people to run into the streets.

A village disappears
In all the devastation wrought by the quake, little looks as bleak as Donghekou.

The road to the village ends in a tangled twist of metal and tar. In the small valley below, the village itself has disappeared when the mountain collapsed. Locals said two other villages further upstream, Ciban and Kangle, had suffered the same fate. The three villages were home to about 300 families, locals said.

Eerie and still, the remaining landscape has few signs of human life — a soiled green floral scarf, a rubber pipe, a log.

"Oh God! I have lost everything," said Wen Xiaoying, 32, whose voice shook as she surveyed the valley below for the first time since returning from far-off Guangdong province where she worked.

She held up one hand as she ticked off the family members that died -- her father, her mother, her sister and her brother-in-law — all of them buried somewhere in the muck before her.

"When I saw them the last time, we celebrated together," said Wen, a glimmer of a smile showing through as she remembered happier days. "I didn't expect it would be the last time I saw them."

Who's left? 'Only me'
Su Ciyao trudged over the bend in plastic slippers, carrying a plastic rice bag stuffed with salvaged clothes.

"My village is over there," the 44-year-old said, gesturing to the swollen earth behind him. Asked where his family was, he could only shake his head.

"Only me," he said, and then set off without a backward glance.

Drizzling rain in the valley added to the gloom, and to the fear of carloads of people who clogged the twisting mountain roads as they streamed out of the region.

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