Thousands flee quake area over flood fears

DONGHEKOU, China (AP) — Two rivers blocked by landslides threatened to flood towns shattered by China’s massive earthquake, sending thousands of survivors fleeing Saturday in a region still staggering from the country’s worst disaster in 30 years.

A mountain sheared off by the mighty tremor cut the Qingzhu river and swallowed the riverside village of Donghekou whole, entombing an unknown number of people inside a huge mound of brown earth.

Compounding the horror for survivors, a lake rising behind the wall of debris threatens to break its banks and send torrents cascading into villages downstream.

Panicky residents streamed out of the entire county on the northern edge of the quake zone, spurred on by mobile phone text messages sent en masse by local government officials warning that the water level was rising and people downstream were being evacuated.

In the town of Beichuan, 60 miles to the south, thousands fled as the reports circulated.

Rescue work resumed later in the day and experts were monitoring the river above Beichuan, the People’s Daily newspaper said on its Web site. The swift exodus underscored the jitters running through the disaster zone. A strong aftershock — the second in two days and measured by the U.S. Geological Survey at magnitude 5.7 — shook the area early today for 45 seconds, causing people to run into the streets.

In all the devastation wrought by the quake, little looks as bleak as Donghekou.

The road to the village ends in a tangled twist of metal and tar. In the small valley below, the village itself disappeared when the mountain collapsed. Locals said two other villages further upstream, Ciban and Kangle, had suffered the same fate. The three villages were home to about 300 families, locals said.

Eerie and still, the remaining landscape has few signs of human life — a soiled green floral scarf, a rubber pipe, a log.