Workers failed to cover the gas well yesterday in Southwest China's Chongqing Municipality, which started leaking on Saturday morning.

Some 300 workers started filling the well with cement and lime at 10 o'clock in the morning. But their operation did not proceed smoothly as the pressure of the gas at the mouth of the well rose, said sources from PetroChina.

They had to give up late in the afternoon and were trying to develop a new strategy to cover the well, said the source who did not want to be identified.

By yesterday morning more than 10,000 local residents inside the danger zone, which was within a 0.5-kilometre radius of the leaking well, had been evacuated. Kaixian County, where the leakage took place, was arranging for buses to send residents outside the danger zone, said Jiang Youyi, Kaixian Party chief.

The county had arranged five locations, including government auditoriums and schools, to accommodate the evacuated people. The county government provided them with quilts, instant noodles and mineral water, Jiang said.

He said that most of the evacuated local residents were calm because nobody had died in the incident.

Fifteen-year-old Liao Qingrong, who frolicked with classmates from her home village of Shengli, in a hall of the county government, recalled the time of the leakage.

"I was watching television at home around 9 o'clock on Saturday morning when my parents shouted that the well was in flames, and that we must flee immediately," she told China Daily.

"Is another incident like that of December 2003 happening when a leak caused the death of 243 people near the village? I asked myself. But I didn't smell the gas like I did in the eruption of December 2003," she recalled.

She was immediately evacuated with her mother and younger brother and has been living in the county government hall since Saturday night.

"The county government provides us with meals in nearby restaurants. More than 1,000 of us are currently living in the hall," she said.

Liao was looking forward to returning home and resuming her study at school. "We don't know when we can return home but everybody tells me that it won't take long."

Although local residents smelt no strange odours near the site of the leak, departments in charge of environmental protection in Chongqing Municipality, which has Kaixian under its administration, had set-up seven stations to monitor the environment in the 2-kilometre radius around the mouth of the leaking well.

Source: China Daily