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QING LIAN, China-It is a simple strand of red plastic hanging between two trees, but for residents of this battered town, it is the line between life and potential death.On one side are 11,000 residents who have been huddling under plastic sheets since the May 12 earthquake devastated northern Sichuan Province. On the other is a lush plain of farmland and homes that government officials say will be washed away should a swollen reservoir of trapped river water break through the wall of rock, dirt and trees that holds it in place. Soldiers stand sentinel on roads leading to the flood plain, which includes much of this picturesque town, blocking residents eager to till their fields or salvage clothing from quake-damaged homes.“It’s for their own good,” said Bian Dedi, 43, who was patrolling the deserted downtown on Thursday and shooing away the few residents who had slipped through the cordon. “In an instant, everything you see would be under water.”For the past three days, a phalanx of earth-moving machines and soldiers have been struggling to complete a 300 yard sluice that would relieve pressure on a lake growing behind a landslide dam on the Jian River. On Thursday, the lake, dubbed Tangjiashan, rose another five feet, to about 70 feet short of the top of the barrier, and officials warned it might take another three days before the drainage canal was complete. For the 1.3 million people living downstream, the looming threat is adding to the misery of those coping with a disaster that has already killed 68,500 people and injured 87,000. Officials say another 19,000 are missing and presumed dead.In recent days, 160,000 people have been relocated from low-lying towns and villages and the government has set in place an ambitious evacuation scheme that would send more than a million people dashing to higher ground should the dam break.If that happens, experts say, it is likely to strike suddenly. "Once that process starts, it’s virtually impossible to do anything to decrease the water,” Alexander Densmore, a seismologist at Durham University in Britain, told Reuters. “When they fail, they tend to fail catastrophically."Here in Qing Lian, a tourist town that straddles the Jian River shortly after its descent from the mountains, residents have been forced to disassemble and rebuild their bamboo-and-plastic shelters five times over the past two weeks. Each move coincided with the worrisome expansion of the impounded lake, which is 30 miles upstream. “I may be old but I can still run if I have to,” said Chen Biqi, 70, a farmer who has been instructed to hike up a nearby knoll should the dam burst.Compared to the terror of the earthquake, many people here view the potential peril of flooding as an annoyance, just one more indignation meted out by nature. Most expressed confidence that the government’s evacuation plan would keep them from harm’s way.“Earthquakes are unpredictable but at least we would have some warning if a flood is coming,” said Cheng Huayuan, 65, a retired factory worker who was among thousands of people camped out in Mianyang, a city of 600,000 that stretches out along both sides of the Jian River.Like many of her neighbors, Ms. Cheng has a home, but she said she is too unnerved by the constant aftershocks to sleep in her 8th floor apartment.“You never know if the next tremor will bring the building down,” she said. “A flood we can handle.”Not everyone is so confident.At Mianyang’s long-distance bus station, thousands of people clamored to board buses headed to other cities on Thursday. Hundreds of others sought shelter atop a forested hill a mile outside the city.Even though she is only a half-hour walk to the safety of the mountains, Deng Huilan, 45, said she often spends the night nodding off in a chair. “I don’t dare fall into a deep sleep,” said Ms. Deng, who is sharing a tent with a dozen family members, including her 80-year-old parents. “None of us can swim.”As in the days of Noah....
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