POURING AIDS

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang on Sunday urged the country's railway and transportation departments to make every effort to facilitate the entry of tents, quilts and other materials into the quake-hit area.

With resumed traffic and eased traffic jams on more roads, relief supplies are reaching an increasing number of the needy survivors.

About 12,700 tents, 34,100 quilts and 12,700 camp beds, as well as 12,700 tonnes of food and drinking water, have arrived at the quake-hit zone as of 2 p.m., said Zhong Mian, vice governor of Sichuan.

Local government has relocated 171,000 people whose houses were toppled or damaged in the quakes, Zhong said.

The survivors are also helping themselves. In one of the relocation sites in Lushan's Baosheng Township, over 100 people are handing each other dishes, sharing the food they cooked with meat and vegetables they risked their lives to fetch from their damaged houses.

"My food is also theirs," one of them told Xinhua.

As of Sunday afternoon, water had been drained off from five reservoirs in Lushan, which suffered cracks and leakage and had posed a threat to people living in the lower reaches, to ensure the local residents' safety, according to a Lushan County government statement.

The quake-stricken area is expected to receive rainfall in the following three days, according to the Sichuan Provincial Meteorological Observatory.

LIFE MIRACLE

The institute warned that rescuers should be aware of the secondary disasters such as falling rocks and landslides triggered by continual aftershocks, which have already caused great difficulties for the rescuers.

On the road linking Lushan and Baoxing, where the traffic has been newly restored, rolling stones triggered by the aftershocks kept hitting the roof of the passing vehicles.

"It is like being hit by 'an intense shower'," said Sun Tiexiang, a Xinhua reporter who was travelling with the car of a local medical team.

Bao Yuhuai, a senior officer with an armed police rescue team in Lushan told Xinhua that aftershocks and the ensuing landslides are the biggest challenges in road clearing.

"Some sections we just cleared have been buried by falling stones after the aftershocks," he said.

But the nonstop rescue did pay off. According to the head office of China's armed police, 5,800 police staff have saved 103 people in quake hit areas.

More than 2,300 firemen who are engaged in rescue work have saved 96 people, according to China's Ministry of Public Security.

The total number of the people saved in the quake region, however, is not immediately known.

In the small hours on Sunday, a 12-year-old girl, pulled out of her collapsed house in Lushan by rescuers nearly two hours after the quake, came to herself from a nearly 14-hour coma thanks to a major chest operation in a military hospital in Chengdu, capital of Sichuan.

"It's definitely a difficult operation in such a situation," said Su Yonglin, the vice head of the hospital. "But it is a very successful one." Enditem (by Xinhua Writers Yi Ling, Li Laifang, Dang Wenbo, Wu Dan, Huang Yi, Hai Mingwei, Yu Li, Hou Yi in Ya'an, Qiang Lijing, Wang Wen, Fu Shuangqi, Cheng Zhuo, Hu Longjiang, Gui Tao and Yao Yuan in Beijing)