Chinese Practice Evacuation Of 1.3 Million

An earthquake official says a mass evacuation drill reported by a Chinese news agency is just a drill, although 200,000 people have been ordered to evacuate to higher areas in Sichuan province because of fears that a lake formed by the earthquake this month could burst.

The official with the press office of Mianyang City Quake Control and Relief Headquarters said Friday that a report by Xinhua News Agency of the evacuation of 1.3 million people was wrong.

"Not all 1.3 million people will be actually evacuated in that period. People will only be evacuated in case of actual collapsing of the whole bank," the said the official, who would give only her surname Chen.

She said the drill period through Monday would be used to test the command system of the quake control and relief headquarters.

The government said Friday that the confirmed death toll in the earthquake more than two weeks ago has risen to 68,858, an increase of about 350 from a day earlier. Another 18,618 people were still missing.

Meanwhile, thousands of children and parents separated after China's earthquake have been reunited, officials said Friday, while the government has been inundated with requests from families to adopt other children orphaned by the disaster.

Social workers have helped bring together more than 7,000 children and their families since the earthquake struck Sichuan province May 12, said Ye Lu, director of social welfare at the provincial Civil Affairs Department.

"A little more than 1,000 children remain unclaimed or orphaned," Ye said.

The government has been overwhelmed with calls seeking to adopt those children, Ye said.

"We are still getting thousands of calls per week asking about how to adopt, but we are still hoping to find the parents of these 1,000 kids," he said.

In the chaos after the magnitude 7.9 earthquake, which made 5 million homeless, many survivors were separated from their families.

Also on Friday, government officials in Tokyo said Japan would not use military planes to deliver relief goods to China after Beijing voiced uneasiness over the idea.

China had been in talks with Tokyo about using Japanese military planes to deliver aid, which could have become the first significant military dispatch between the two nations since World War II.

But Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Nobutaka Machimura said Tokyo would not insist on using the military.

Japan invaded China and conquered large parts of it in the 1930s before being defeated by the Allies in 1945, and many Chinese still strongly resent Japan for its military aggression.

China's military was still working in the northern part of Sichuan to drain the Tangjiashan lake, which formed above Beichuan town after a quake-triggered landslide blocked a river.

There are worries it could burst unless water is drained away. The soldiers were using 40 heavy earth-moving machines to dig drainage channels. Officials quoted in state media have not said how long the work would take.

Some 158,000 people living downstream from Tangjiashan lake have been evacuated, and officials have pledged to warn nearby residents in case of flooding so they have time to flee. Troops have sealed off Beichuan to the public.