China says quake toll may rise to 50,000

The Chinese government said today that the death toll from this week’s earthquake in Sichuan province was likely to reach 50,000 as rescuers digged out more victims, some still alive but many more dead.

The People’s Liberation Army stepped up what appears to be one of its largest peacetime deployment of troops. More than 130,000 soldiers were reported to have reached the disaster scene this morning, with thousands more on their way, according to statistics published by the New China News Agency. They include 6,800 parachutists and 2,160 doctors.

With the clock ticking on the possibility of finding survivors, China dropped its insistence on going it alone. An elite team of Japanese rescue workers was due to arrive in the provincial capital of Chengdu tonight. They would be the first foreign aid workers invited to the earthquake scene, although China has been accepting donations of money and supplies. A Taiwanese team was also expected shortly.

“We will never give up hope looking for survivors,” Gao Qiang, vice minister of health, said in a news conference.

By now, troops have reached the heart of the tragedy, mountainous Wenchuan County, which was the epicenter of Monday’s magnitude 7.9 quake. Although earthquake victims have been known to survive for more than a week, their chances dim with each passing day and the statistics already are looking grim. A team of paratroopers working out of the hardest-hit areas in one day pulled out 13 survivors and 125 dead from the rubble, according to the statistics released today.

The military’s role is not just to rescue and care for victims of the earthquake, but also to repair and inspect damage to infrastructure. Of particular concern are the numerous dams around the Minjiang River, a tributary of the Yangtze.

The largest of them, the 2-year-old Zipingpu dam, sustained serious cracks that are under repair. Chinese officials said the water level in the dam had been lowered, eliminating the possibility of a catastrophic accident.

Aviva Imhoff, an expert with the Berkeley-based International Rivers Network, said there were 390 dams in the earthquake area that could present problems.

“Chinese seismologists have been warning for year about locating dams next to earthquake fault lines, but the government has ignored them,” Imhoff said. “If one of the larger dams breaks, it would be untold destruction downstream.”

Residents of the earthquake area have complained that some of the smaller dams appear to have burst with the earthquake. Fu Xingyi, 44, a construction worker, said dams around his village had disappeared under landslides.

“I was taking great risk just trying to walk out through the water released by the dam,” he said.

Chinese environmental authorities are also inspecting nuclear installations in Mianyang, 60 miles from the epicenter. A French nuclear watchdog, the Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety, said in a statement this week that “it is not possible at this stage to exclude damage to these installations,” although the group said it knew of no damage.

The disaster relief effort has gotten high marks from the Chinese public and from international observers.

“They have a clear mission of what they have to do, and it looks like they are being efficient about it,” said Joseph Fewsmith, a specialist on the Chinese military at Boston University. “This is something the [People’s Liberation Army] does well, mobilizing in civilian disasters.”

 barbara.demick@latimes.com

Times staff writer Mark Magnier in Hanwang, China, contributed to this report.