MIANYANG, China - Chinese authorities prepared on Saturday to drain a swelling lake formed by a devastating earthquake, completing work on a drainage channel to divert water that threatens hundreds of thousands downstream.
Officials are expected to discharge flood water from the lake into the channel between Sunday and Tuesday, the official Xinhua News Agency reported, quoting Yue Xi, deputy chief of the water and electricity section of the People's Armed Police.
The lake, called Tangjiashan, formed above Beichuan town in the Mianyang region of Sichuan province when a hillside plunged into a river valley during the May 12 quake.
Chinese authorities had evacuated nearly 200,000 people by early Saturday and warned more than 1 million others to be ready to leave quickly if the lake floods.
The confirmed death toll from China's worst quake in three decades was raised Saturday to 68,977, an increase of about 120 people from a day earlier. Another 17,974 people were still missing, the State Council, or Cabinet, said. The daily increase was the smallest since the government started announcing death tolls shortly after the quake hit.
Xinhua said "a total of 197,477 people were evacuated to safe ground as of 8 a.m. Saturday." It did not say how the number was determined. Some of the people may have been in the path of the planned runoff.
State television showed bulldozers and other heavy earth-moving equipment working on the water diversion channel. It did not show how far up the landslide the channel had been carved.
Xinhua said Tan Li, the Communist Party chief of Mianyang, had issued another order for all 1.3 million people in the area to be evacuated if "the barrier of the quake lake fully opens" and floods the area.
There was no sign that the banks of the lake were about to burst. Troops have sealed off Beichuan to the public.
Tangjiashan is the largest of more than 30 lakes that have formed behind landslides caused by the quake, which also weakened man-made dams in the mountainous parts of the disaster zone.
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