Breaking: Chinese troops rush to plug 'extremely dangerous' cracks in dam upriver from quake area

Two thousand Chinese soldiers are working to plug an "extremely dangerous" cracks in a dam upriver from the earthquake-hit town of Dujiangyan.

The official Xinhua news agency said that 2,000 troops had been sent to work on the Zipingku Dam, just north of the provincial capital of Chengdu.

The new criss comes as rescue workers are struggling to reach nearly 60,000 people who remain missing near the epicentre of the Sichuan earthquake, prompting fears that the death toll will continue to soar.

This morning officials speaking from the epicentre of Monday's 7.9 magnitude earthquake in Sichuan province said that entire towns in the area had been 'razed to the ground' and left without a single house standing. ...(more on what's happening in area)

Some 2,000 Chinese soldiers have been rushed to help with plugging "extremely dangerous" cracks that have appeared in a dam upriver from China’s earthquake-hit town of Dujiangyan and its 580,000 residents.

The Ministry of Water Resources said Dujiangyan would be swamped if major problems emerged at the dam. It called for protection of the Zipingpu Reservoir that lies across the Min river between Dujiangyan and Wenchuan - the area at the epicentre of Monday’s tremor.

“Upstream on the Min river is an important reservoir called Tulong which is already imperilled. If the danger intensifies, this could affect some power stations downstream. This is an extremely dangerous situation,” said He Biao, deputy party chief of the surrounding Aba prefecture.

The earthquake had caused the 760-megawatt hydropower generating unit at Zipingpu to collapse. It went into operation only in 2006 as part of a programme to develop China’s poorer, Western regions....(more)