As the engineers and army officers marched in, more than 80,000 people living in the quake-hit region of Beichuan county were being evacuated today under an emergency plan drawn up in the face of a swelling “quake lake”.

Tangjiashan Lake is one of 35 that have formed after the 8.0-magnitude earthquake that hit China’s Sichuan province on May 12, causing hundreds of landslides to block the area’s fast-flowing rivers.

The water levels at Tangjiashan have continued to rise ever since. They rose by another 1.79 metres today and are now just 25 metres below the lake barrier.

80,000 local residents are due to be evacuated from the area by midnight tonight, joining another 70,000 people who have already been evacuated from Mianyang city.

"It's better for them to complain about the trouble that the evacuation would bring than to shed tears after the possible danger," said Liu Ning, an official with the Ministry of Water Resources.

The lake currently holds 130 million cubic meters of water. If it burst its banks entirely, more than 1.3 million people would need to be relocated. Inaccessible by road, dozens of diggers have been dropped into the mountainous area by helicopter and more than 600 engineers and soldiers have come in on foot. They are working around the clock to create a sluice to drain the water.

But the Chinese state news agency said today that at least 50,000 cubic metres of debris would have to be removed to build the sluice and it is not expected to be finished before June 5.

Meanwhile, the government raised the count of the confirmed dead to 67,183 today, a jump of around 2,000. Almost 28,000 people are still missing and the number of injured has gone up to almost 362,000.

China will be rocked by powerful earthquake aftershocks for months, a senior expert warned today, as two more strong tremors struck.

He Yongnian, former deputy director of the China Seismological Bureau, said aftershocks would continue for two or three months. The latest, measuring 5.4, occurred today, with the tremor felt in Chengdu.

There were no immediate reports of major damage.

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