China has claimed a 'decisive victory' in its battle to avert a flood disaster after water began to safely drain from a quake lake in Sichuan province.
Water at the lake in Tangjiashan has now fallen to below 720m, meaning the number of people at risk if the dam bursts has fallen from 1.3 million to 50,000.
Torrents of muddy water swept away the remains of collapsed buildings and mountains of other rubble caused by last month's devastating earthquake which left more than 86,000 people dead.
Authorities said the controlled operation to release the vast quantities of water, which involved the evacuation of more than 250,000 people from the flood zone, had proceeded relatively smoothly.
The Tangjiashan lake was created when landslides blocked a river in southwest China's mountainous Sichuan province during the 12 May earthquake.
Authorities had warned that more than 1m quake survivors could be at risk of a huge flood if the unstable dam burst its banks, and China's military had led frantic efforts to engineer a controlled release of the water.
Those efforts, which included firing small missiles and using dynamite to clear boulders from the planned spillways, finally began paying off today as vast amounts of water began pouring out of the drainage channels.
Water has flowed steadily out of the lake 50 times faster than it was coming in, the state-run Xinhua news agency said, a rate roughly the equivalent of two Olympic-sized swimming pools being drained every second.
