Every day, the 58-year-old returns to clean the home he bought a year ago with his life savings. Whenever an aftershock occurs, Guo throws down his cleaning cloth and flees the building.

Yet, Guo is not sure how long he can continue this routine. Wall cracks caused by the 8.0-magnitude quake are growing larger by the day. Continuous landslides from a nearby hill have buried the first four floors of the building just behind his house.

"Can we still live in here?" Guo asks as he stares at the cracks running through the bedrooms and living room.

It is a question puzzling the other 107,000 residents of the county, close to the epicenter of the May 12 tremor.

The county seat of Wenchuan also lies ominously on top of three fault lines, making its 40,000 residents vulnerable to potential tremors. Similarly, potential disasters such as landslides and mudslides threaten the lives of those in mountain villages.

Other quake-hit areas in the province share Wenchuan's worries.

Seven towns and three county seats have reportedly applied to be relocated, a draft reconstruction proposal prepared by related government departments has showed.

As the central and provincial governments study the reconstruction plans for the region, a number of experts are advocating for a massive relocation of residents from Wenchuan's uninhabitable areas.

Some say that the suggestion, if carried through, could alter the fate of tens of thousands of quake victims made homeless by the disaster.

Land lost

Wenchuan's county seat lies about 70 km northwest of Sichuan's provincial capital, Chengdu. It is surrounded by bare mountains and nestled in a narrow valley upstream of the Minjiang River. Covering an area of 3.53 sq km, the place used to be home to about 40,000 people.

With abundant hydropower and mineral resources, the county seat had grown from a small village in the 1950s to one of the most prosperous towns in the Aba Tibetan and Qiang ethnic autonomous prefecture.

If not for the quake, new buildings and factories would continue to sprout on its fringes, encroaching on the narrowing riverbed.

At first glance, visitors to Wenchuan are likely to overlook the damage caused by the tremor. The facades of most buildings appear to be intact, with few structures collapsed.

But like Guo's home, cracks have crept onto their insides, making them dangerous to enter and even costlier to dismantle, compared with those already being reduced to rubble.

"These are standing debris," said Zhang Xianwu, director of Wenchuan's urban construction bureau, in an interview with China Daily late last month. "If we want to reconstruct the county seat, more than 95 percent of the buildings need to be torn down."

A strict enforcement of building codes helped ensure most of the county seat's structures were left standing, Zhang said.

Previous earthquakes in Aba, which is said to have occurred more frequently than any other place in China, reportedly forced local authorities to insist that all the buildings adopt proper quake-resistant structures.

More than 50 earthquakes with a magnitude above 4.75 struck the region between 1949 and 1990, Aba records showed. In 1933 and 1976, three quakes with a magnitude of more than 7.2 hit Wenchuan, narrowly missing its county seat.

"Now, only about one-ninth of the area in Wenchuan's county seat is still safe for human habitation," said Yin Zhi, director of the urban planning and design institute of Tsinghua University.

Yin, who was citing a study by the Sichuan geological survey bureau, is now leading a team of 20 experts organized by the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development to the area. Since May 18, the team has visited most of the towns in Aba to prepare the reconstruction proposal for the ministry.

Shortly after the quake, the Sichuan geological survey bureau also sent a team of geologists to the quake zone to evaluate damages. According to their reports, the three fault lines running beneath Wenchuan's county seat pose a major threat of future quakes.

In a conference held this month by the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development, most experts agreed that new buildings in Wenchuan should be kept 500 m away from the fault lines, Yin said. This means only about one-ninth of the area in the county seat, or 0.4 sq km, is still safe for habitation.

"The remaining plot can support no more than 5,000 people," Yin said. "The rest of the residents all need to be relocated."

Constant worry

Other than the threat posed by the geological faults, fear of disasters such as worsening sandstorms and continuing landslides are keeping Wenchuan residents awake.

"We now have a phobia of three things," said Yu Shizhong, a retired primary school teacher of the region. "Sunny days, rainy days and the hills around us."

Located in a river valley, Wenchuan's climate is nevertheless hot and arid. Its average annual precipitation is less than 500 mm, even lower than Beijing's 585 mm. This makes it hard for trees and grass to grow on the mountain slopes. Most of its precipitation also falls between June and August, with rainstorms giving rise to mudslides that are fatal to the area's sparse vegetation.

Over the past two decades, the Wenchuan government has been making efforts to grow trees on the mountains, but to no avail.

On the hills surrounding its county seat, there are only occasional clumps of shrub, offering visual relief from its drab slopes. The sizzling sunshine and relentless wind have been eroding rocks and the boulders on the mountain for years, slowly reducing them into sand and dust.

On sunny afternoons, strong wind in the valley would blow up the sand and dust, forming a huge yellow expanse that blankets the whole county. The earthquake, which added more than 300 hazardous spots such as landslides around the county seat, made the environmental situation worse.

Local residents say they have been suffering daylong sandstorms for half a month following the quake.

Wang Songbai, director of the People's Hospital in Wenchuan, says the hospital received more than 3,800 patients suffering from respiratory diseases in the month after the quake, compared with less than 400 in the same period last year.

"The worsening sandstorms are the main reason for these cases," Wang said. "Living in such an environment is like staying in a concrete-producing factory without wearing a mask."

Although a heavy dose of rain helps reduce the dust in the air, it creates another problem: mudslides.

Official figures show that the quake destroyed more than half of Wenchuan's arable land, mostly through landsides and mudslides. Experts say it will take about a decade for the mudslides to subside in quake zones, which pose a constant threat to those living in the mountains.

On June 17, about 10,000 people were evacuated from Wenchuan's mountainous villages, as continuous downpour over the past days threatened to trigger severe landslides.

Liu Hanxiu, 56, is one of the 659 villagers evacuated from the Tongshan village on that day. According to her, the mudslides destroyed almost half of the village's 50-hectare farmland. It also blocked the only water ditch in her village, cutting out its sole drinking water source as well as creating a huge quake lake in the valley behind their homes.

Ten days after being evacuated, few people in Liu's village were willing to return to their homes. They feared the collapse of the quake lake.

"The villagers don't want to go back," said Liu, a member of the Qiang ethnic group.

"Some in our village have lost their land completely. How can they make a living without a single inch of farmland?"

Crucial decisions

The authorities have not decided on whether to relocate Wenchuan's county seat completely, said Tang Kai, director of the urban planning department of the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development, in a press conference held on July 9.

"The shortage of land in quake-devastated counties is the major obstacle in choosing a new site," Tang said.

Most quake-stricken regions are already overpopulated. Wenchuan's natural environment is suitable for supporting about 50,000 people, rather than its existing population of 110,000, a report by the Institute of Mountain Hazards and Environment under China's Academy of Sciences showed.

"Relocation will be a very complicated and difficult task, especially for the local government ," said Yin from Tsinghua University.

"The central government will have to carve out new administrative areas for the relocated population, which may incur conflicts of interest among different regional governments," Yin said.

"Whatever the difficulties, the right decision must be made.

"Otherwise it will be like laying a weak foundation for future tragedies."

(China Daily July 16, 2008)