Rescuers reach epicenter of China quake

HANWANG, China — Rescuers arrived for the first time in the epicenter of China's massive earthquake, scouring flattened mountain villages for thousands of victims and distributing air-dropped supplies to survivors.

The official Xinhua News Agency said some 2,000 soldiers were sent to repair "extremely dangerous" cracks in the Zipingpu Dam upriver from the earthquake-hit city of Dujiangyan.

The government said late Wednesday that experts had inspected the dam and declared it safe, according to a statement broadcast on state TV and posted on the Sichuan government Web site.

Still, another report said the reservoir behind the dam was being emptied to relieve pressure on the structure.

"The flow is extremely swift, and the bottom of the reservoir can be seen, showing the riverbed," the state-sponsored Chinese business news magazine Caijing said in a report from the scene that was posted on its Web site.

Four-inch cracks had opened up on top of the dam, and landslides poured down on the hills on either side, the report said.

China's top economic planning body said that the quake had damaged 391 mostly small dams. He Biao, the director of the Aba Disaster Relief headquarters in northern Sichuan province, said there were concerns over dams close to the epicenter.

"Currently, the most dangerous problems are several reservoirs near Wenchuan," he said, according to a transcript on the CCTV Web site.

"There are already serious problems with the Tulong Reservoir on the Min River. It may collapse. If that happens, it would affect several power plants below and be extremely dangerous," he said.

Help also began to arrive by helicopter and on foot in some of the hardest-to-reach areas, where some victims trapped for more than two days under collapsed buildings were still being pulled out alive. But the enormous scale of the devastation meant that resources were stretched thin, and makeshift aid stations and refugee centers were springing up over the disaster area the size of Belgium.

The death toll of nearly 15,000 appeared likely to soar far higher.

Leveled hospitals forced doctors and nurses to treat survivors in the street. Helicopters dropped food and medicine to isolated towns. Mourners burned money before rows of bodies, believing their lost relatives could use it in the afterlife.