DUJIANGYAN (China), May 14: Thousands of Chinese troops have rushed to plug “extremely dangerous” cracks in a dam upriver from the earthquake-hit town of Dujiangyan in Sichuan province, state media said.

The death toll in the earthquake rose to nearly 15,000 on Wednesday. But it was expected to rise with official news agency Xinhua quoting provincial vice-governor Li Chengyun as saying that in Sichuan province alone another 25,788 people were buried and 14,051 missing.

Xinhua said 2,000 troops were sent to work on the Zipingpu Dam.

Dujiangyan is just north of the provincial capital of Chengdu. The city is not far from Wenchuan, the epicentre of the 7.9-magnitude quake.

The National Development Reform Commission, China’s top economic planning body, said on its website that the earthquake had damaged 391 dams. It said two of the dams were large ones, 28 were medium-sized and the rest were small ones.

In a separate report, Xinhua quoted the ministry of water resources as urging protection of the Zipingpu Reservoir between Dujiangyan and Wenchuan. It said Dujiangyan would be “swamped” if major problems emerged at the dam.

But Xinhua said the ministry had set up an emergency command centre at the dam “to discharge the reservoir’s rising waters and guarantee that the damage posed no threat to Dujiangyan and the neighbouring Chengdu Plain.”

More than 40,000 people were dead, missing or buried under rubble in China’s southwest, officials said, as the full horror of its devastating earthquake began to emerge.

Rescue teams who punched into the quake’s stricken epicentre reported whole towns all but wiped off the map, spurring frantic efforts to bring emergency relief to the survivors.

Planes and helicopters air-dropped supplies, 100 troops parachuted into a county that had been cut off, and rescuers in cities and towns across Sichuan province fought to pull the living and the dead from the debris.

But the overwhelming message that came back from this southwestern province was that only now is a picture slowly beginning to form of the epic scale of Monday’s quake.

Far beyond the numbers is the human tragedy behind China’s worst quake in a generation as rescue teams claw through twisted metal and concrete.

Cries for help were heard from a flattened school in Yingxiu, where people tried to dig out survivors with bare hands, state media said.

“The losses have been severe,” Wang Yi, who heads an armed police unit sent into the epicentre zone, was quoted as saying by Sichuan Online news site.—Agencies

Pulled alive

Exhausted rescuers and earthquake victims celebrated on Wednesday when they pulled a woman and her pregnant daughter alive from the rubble of their home, a rare moment of joy in this shattered city.

In the Dujiangyan city, stricken relatives watched as firemen plucked Zhang Xiaoyan and her mother from the flattened remains of their six-storey apartment block.

“We are very happy. We have been standing here shouting for two days,” said Pan Jianjun, a relative. “We are so grateful to the government and Wen Jiabao for their help.”—Reuters