(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-05-31 09:36

CHENGDU, China -- Most of the 8,000 children found alone after China's devastating earthquake have been reunited with their parents, Chinese officials said Friday.

About 1,000 have not been spoken for but the need to find adoptive families is now far less than earlier thought, said Ye Lu, a senior official at the Civil Affairs Department in hard-hit Sichuan province.

An old woman kisses her grandson who survived from the earthquake, at a makeshift shelter in Mianzhu City, southwest China's Sichuan Province, May 25, 2008. [Xinhua]

Officials have been deluged by offers from within China and overseas to adopt orphans from the May 12 quake , but the need was now far less than was earlier thought, said Ye Lu, a senior official at the Civil Affairs Department in devastated Sichuan province.

"We are still getting thousands of calls per week asking about how to adopt, but we are still hoping to find the parents of these 1,000 kids," Ye said.

More than 18,000 people are still listed as missing more than two weeks after the 8.0-magnitude quake, which crumbled scores of towns and left 5 million people homeless scattered across hardest-hit Sichuan province.

The confirmed death toll rose to 68,858 on Friday. Officials expect the final tally to top 80,000.

Separately, officials upgraded the threat posed by waters rising quickly behind a mass of rocks and earth that tumbled from a mountainside when the tremor struck and blocked a river running through a valley dotted by dozens of villages.

Troops are moving almost 200,000 people who are in the direct path of the potential flood to higher ground -- many of whom are already living in tents or other temporary shelters after their homes were destroyed.

Officials also said they had a plan to evacuate a total of 1.3 million people in and around Mianyang, a city that could face flooding, within five hours if the quake-created dam wall breaks.

An official with the press office of Mianyang City Quake Control and Relief Headquarters said authorities would run a drill for three days starting Saturday.

Residents start evacuating from downtown Mianyang, Sichuan province, on Friday as the threat of a quake lake bursting its banks mounts. [Xinhua]

The drill would consist of testing the command system of various levels of government officials to ensure that any order to evacuate -- if it comes -- would be passed on quickly to everyone in the valley, said the official who would only give her surname of Chen.

She said 197,500 people in the valley are being moved to higher ground.

Hundreds of troops using 40 bulldozers and heavy excavating machines are working around the clock at the lake, named Tangjiashan, to dig channels that will drain the lake safely.

There was no sign that the lake dam was close to bursting Friday, though officials say it could do so in coming days.

Tangjiashan is the largest of more than 30 lakes that have formed behind landslides caused by the quake, which also weakened man-made dams in the mountainous parts of the disaster zone.

Many of the 5 million left homeless are living in tent camps or prefabricated housing being erected by troops, which are taking on the tone of new villages.

Child survivors of the quake attend school in a tent at a temporary evacuation camp set up at the Jiuzhou sports stadium in the earthquake-hit area of Mianyang, Sichuan Province May 28, 2008. [Agencies]

In one camp at Mianzhu, hospitals, schools and even a makeshift shopping mall had emerged, along with stores selling shampoo, shoes, beer and clothes.

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