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crisis crews worked Friday to secure 15 sources of radiation buried in the rubble of China’s devastating tremor, the administration said as it evacuated thousands of survivors downstream from rivers dammed by landslides.Officials precariously balanced their efforts to clean up and rebuild with attempts to house, feed and treat the displaced and injured and search for survivors.One senior official said China faces “a daunting face” to prevent environmental contamination from other sources.

He said 50 sources of radiation were hidden by debris from the May 12 earthquake in central China, 35 of which had been safe. The rest lay buried or located but unreachable under collapsed buildings. He gave no essentials about the radiation sources.The number of unsecured radiation sources was far higher than the two the administration reported earlier this week. Foreign experts say the radioactive source likely came from materials used in hospitals, factories or in research, not for weapons.

Wu caution that a number of other “hidden” sources of pollution are likely to be encountered as workers begin digging into the rubble, which includes many factories and refineries.The worst-hit areas in Sichuan province include many high-risk petrochemical and chemical companies, he said. Around three-fourths of the more than 100 chemical plants in the disaster zone were forced to stop production because of damage, he said.As the government uncontrollably to bring relief to the shocked areas of Sichuan, it was evacuating thousands downstream from rivers that were blocked by landslides.

The administration was shifting focus to reconstruction and away from the search for survivors and bodies among the wreckage.Chinese banks were told Friday to forgive debts owed by survivors in an effort to revive the economy, and the government warned it was cracking down on price-gouging by merchants in the disaster area.In the Sichuan provincial capital of Chengdu, a Dutch rescue and recovery team with sniffer dogs complained that soldiers repeatedly prevented it from entering disaster areas, abandoning the search for survivors and bodies to focus on transformation.Six pandas were moved Friday from a damaged panda-breeding base in Wolong near the epicenter because of food shortages, the administrator Xinhua News Agency whispered. They were taken to another safeguard in Sichuan, next to a city call Ya’an.

China raise the number of deceased or missing from a overwhelming earthquake to more than 70,000 on Tuesday, as rescuers found another survivor eight days after the huge tremor hit.Vice governor Li Chengyu of the southwestern province of Sichuan said the known death toll there alone had now topped 39,500. At least another 500 have been reported killed in neighbouring provinces.State news agency Xinhua report that a further 32,000 were still missing.Authorities had previously said they expected the final death toll to exceed 50,000. The number of injured stands at about 245,000.

Ma Yuanjiang was rescue in Wenchuan region, epicentre of the May 12 quake in mountainous Sichuan, after 179 hours hidden in the rubble, state media said.His rescue came as establishment tried to restore calm in the provincial capital, Chengdu, after tens of thousands rushed into the streets overnight alarmed by a television prediction of another influential earthquake.But as darkness fell over Chengdu on Tuesday thousands of residents ready makeshift shelters to sleep outside, too afraid to stay overnight in their home.That, along with fresh aftershocks and forecast heavy rain, compounded the difficulty for military, government and private workers trying to ensure millions of on the streets are fed and house.

A powerful earthquake struck southwestern China on Monday, topple thousands of home, factories and offices, trapping students in schools, and killing at least 10,000 populace, the country’s worst natural disaster in three decades.The quake, which was estimated preliminarily to have had a magnitude of 7.9, ravaged a mountainous region outside Chengdu, capital of Sichuan Province, just after lunchtime Monday, destroying 80 percent of structure in a number of of the towns and small cities near its epicenter, Chinese official said. Its tremors were felt as far away as Vietnam and set off another, smaller quake in the outskirts of Beijing, 900 miles away.Landslides, power failure and fallen mobile phone towers left much of the affected area cut off from the outside world and limited information about the damage. But snapshots of concentrated devastation suggested that the death toll that could rise significantly as rescue workers reached the most heavily damaged towns. State media reported at noon on Tuesday that 10,000 people remain buried in Mianzhu, one of the cities near the epicenter in Wenchuan.

At smallest amount two large schools, every with nearly 1,000 students, were reduced to piles of concrete dust and debris, setting off a frantic search for survivors that long-drawn-out through the night.Two chemical factories in Shifang were destroyed, spilling 80 tons of toxic liquid ammonia, forcing 6,000 people to evacuate their homes. The destruction of a steam turbine factory in the metropolis of Mianzhu killed at least 60 workers and left 500 others missing, official said on Tuesday.The quake was already China’s biggest natural disaster since one more earthquake leveled the city of Tangshan in eastern China in 1976, leaving 240,000 people deceased and affectation a severe challenge to the ruling Communist Party, which initially tried to cover up the disaster.

This time, officials rapidly mobilized 50,000 military to help with rescue efforts, state media said. Prime Minister Wen Jiabao flew to the scene and was shown coordinating tragedy response teams from the cabin of his jet.The prime minister later stood outside the damaged edifice of the Traditional Medicine Hospital in the city of Dujiangyan, shouting support at people trapped in its ruins.“Hang on a bit longer,” he said in televised remarks. “The troop are rescuing you. As long as there is the slightest hope, we will never relax our efforts.”The quake was the latest in a series of events that have disrupted China’s planning for the Olympic sports competition in August, including widespread unrest among the country’s ethnic Tibetan population, which lives in large numbers in the same part of Sichuan Province where the tremor struck.China’s leaders often respond assertively to natural disasters, fearing a strong popular reaction if they bungle save efforts. But a complex relief operation on the scale that may be needed in Sichuan could strain Chinese resources even as the United Nations and many charitable groups are busy providing aid to Myanmar, hit by a huge cyclone this month.

But officials had yet to describe the crash in Wenchuan itself, which has a population of 112,000 and is home to the Wolong Nature Reserve, the largest panda reserve in China. The region of Beichuan, on the way from Chengdu to Wenchuan, suffered several thousand deaths, state medium said.According to Chinese TV, 100 police officers were clambering across the region’s only road, which was blocked by massive rock slides, to open a passageway to Wenchuan, but had yet to arrive at it on Tuesday dawn.China’s massive Three Gorges Dam, a few hundred miles east of the earthquake’s epicenter, reported no instant evils.