All 147 residents evacuated from a village of central China's Hubei Province returned home on Tuesday after a landslide site was declared stable.
Workers had dug six ditches in the mudflow to drain water to stop it bringing down more mud, said Xia Changyi, a Xingshan County government official.
The condition of the landslide site was stable and the remaining part of 30,000 cubic meters of the mudflow would remain stable so long as the weather stayed dry, he said.
The day was clear on Tuesday in Xingshan. Weather forecasters said the clear weather would continue in the following two days.
Continuous rain triggered a landslide of 60,000 cubic meters near the Xiaohe village on Saturday afternoon, 2,000 cu m of which caused a rock-mud flow that inundated a nearby primary school and threatened another village with 37 homes. All the villagers were evacuated to a township middle school.
The official said about 900 teaching staff and pupils of the Gaoyang Town Center Primary School, which was hit by the mud flow, would have classes in the Gaoyang Town Middle School for the rest of the spring semester. Their classes would begin on Thursday after a suspension of three days.
Workers are still cleaning the mud in the school and nearby areas. The ground floor classrooms of a building of the primary school were covered with one-meter-deep mud with windows, desks and chairs damaged. The playground was inundated with 30 to 50 centimeters of mud. No mud flow reached the village.
The landslide site is being monitored around-the-clock.
Xia said the county government was entrusting geological disaster prevention experts to come up with a concrete plan for the complete treatment of the landslide area to avoid similar incidents.
(Xinhua News Agency April 23, 2008)
