By Hu Yinan and Zhang Haizhou (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-06-09 08:51

MIANYANG, Sichuan: Grandpa Liu was upset, even almost 24 hours after volunteers delivered shelters and piled up bricks at tents amid the heavy downpour on Friday in this temporary resettlement area threatened by the Tangjiashan quake lake.

A girl does her homework outside her family's tent in Mianyang Sunday. Residents are living in tents in highlands after  being evacuated because a lake formed by a landslide triggered  by last month's quake could flood. [China Daily]

 

"Look at me. See here," said the 73-year-old, who has been on a drip for nine days due to the sweltering heat on the hillside of Baosheng in the city of Mianyang.

"It had been more than 40 C in our tents for days, and I have only slept between two and three hours a night," Liu said.

"And then all of a sudden came the rain that made everyone here stand through the night."

It was hours before young volunteers finished helping each family rebuild their tents on piled-up bricks in the rain in this settlement where 800 people evacuated from the city's Qingyi township have been living since May 30.

The fact that there is nowhere to escape the direct force of nature, be it sunshine or rainfall, makes matters worse.

This resettlement zone lies on an unfinished rural road. With only a few trees standing on each side, people such as Li Jiqin, 63, must trek for roughly 20 minutes to reach the nearest forest to get a cool breeze.

His family wouldn't go back to the tents until the next meal.

Liu and his 72-year-old wife, meanwhile, can hardly manage to get to the forest.

Their stories echo those of many in this farming town. Take Liu for example.

His house by the Fujiang River collapsed in the quake, but his family of eight all managed to escape uninjured except his daughter, whose feet were hit by a wall that fell on her.

They live in a tent meant to accommodate four people from Dengta, a village of 3,800 people relocated here between vast fields as a result of fears over the possible bursting of the Tangjiashan quake lake's banks.

Water flows from lake

After days of evacuation, resettlement and the construction of diversion channels, water finally began to flow from the lake on Saturday morning, but at a pace much slower than what experts and local residents had expected.

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