2010-08-17 07:37

WENCHUAN, Sichuan - The four adult pandas kept in the Wolong Nature Reserve in Wenchuan county, Sichuan province, were not injured despite mudslides in different parts of the mountainous reserve, said Zhang Hemin, chief of the reserve's administrative bureau.

All the 500 tourists and 140 workers at a power station stranded in Wolong have been evacuated, he told China Daily.

The downpour on Friday evening and Saturday morning induced mudslides that blocked the roads leading to Wolong and Yingxiu towns from Gengda township.

No casualties were reported in Wolong and all the 640 tourists and workers have been sent to neighboring Xiaojin county by bus from the reserve's administrative bureau, Zhang said.

Life is normal in Wolong as the bureau has purchased grain and vegetables from its neighboring Ya'an city where the Bifengxia base of the Wolong Nature Reserve is located.

But passengers have to take a roundabout way via Ya'an city to reach Chengdu, the provincial capital.

"The travel time is eight hours compared with the regular three-hour route from Wolong to Yingxiu, Dujiangyan city and Chengdu," said Li Desheng, deputy chief of the reserve's administrative bureau.

The four pandas kept in Wolong are being trained to return to the wild, Li said.

Wolong sent its first panda, Xiang Xiang, to the wild in April 2006 after training it for three years.

But in February 2007, the male panda was found dead on snow in the wild. Researchers thought Xiang Xiang must have fallen to death from a high place after competing for territory and food against wild pandas.

After the magnitude-8.0 earthquake on May 12, 2008 battered Wolong, the reserve transferred all its pandas to its Bifengxia base and parks in different parts of the country.

On June 21 this year, the reserve resumed its training for sending captive pandas to the wild. Officials plan to train four pandas in three years and send one or two to live in the wild, Li said.

On Monday, soldiers and workers were clearing away the mud along the Laohuzui-Yingxiu section of the National Highway 213 in Wenchuan.

The highway is the only passage linking Wenchuan and Chengdu.

On Sunday, the section between Wenchuan county seat and Laohuzui of the highway reopened after it was inundated with water four meters deep.

But it will take about one week to reopen the Laohuzui-Yingxiu section of the highway as the work of clearing the silt is mammoth, said Ren Lu, an information official in Wenchuan.