JIANGYOU, (China), June 10 (Reuters): Floodwaters crashed out of a dangerously unstable "quake lake" in southwest China Tuesday after soldiers blasted open a sluice, significantly easing the threat of disaster for hundreds of thousands of people downstream. Water from the Tangjiashan lake, the largest of the more than 30 formed by the devastating May 12 earthquake inSichuan province, turned into a torrent after troops used explosives to blow away rocks, mud and other rubble blocking its path.
The muddy brown water picked up clumps of trees, cars, fridges and other debris, swamping low-lying areas of the devastated town of Beichuan nearby, washing away remains of corpses, family mementoes and valuables left under the rubble.
The Tangjiashan lake, created when landslides triggered by the quake blocked the flow of the Jianjiang River, has so far prompted the evacuation of more than 250,000 residents downstream in case the mud-and-rock dam bursts.
"The flow downstream has increased dramatically, but the dam hasn't collapsed," Zhou Hua, spokesman for the lake relief operation, told Reuters. "The channel has widened but this isn't a collapse.
The water level behind the dam had dropped by more than 16 meters (53 ft) on Tuesday as 90 million cubic meters of water was released, Xinhua news agency said.
It attributed the abrupt increase in water discharged from the lake to "two massive blasts on Monday evening which broke through the bottleneck" in a sluice opened by soldiers.
The torrents had further widened and lowered the sluice. Further downstream near Mianyang, the river had widened to several hundred meters across, bursting banks in places.
In Jiangyou, a city sandwiched between Beichuan and Mianyang, trees, barrels, televisions, fridges and the occasional dead bodies of quake victims washed by in the roaring waters, Xinhua said.
Mianyang hosts tens of thousands of quake refugees from Beichuan, where more than 15,000 people died in the tremor. Road blocks kept traffic away from nearby Jiangyou, but it was not clear if the whole town was cut off.
The army has set up rocket launchers at several points along the route of the floodwaters to defuse the threat posed to dams and bridges, including a key railway bridge, by any big drifting particles in the water, state television said.Rescuers meanwhile found a relief helicopter, carrying 19 quake survivors, medical workers and crew, that crashed near the epicenter of the quake on May 31. There were no survivors.
