HANWANG, China - Chinese troops rushed to plug "extremely dangerous" cracks in a dam upriver from Dujiangyan, an earthquake-hit town, state media said Thursday.

The official Xinhua News Agency said 2,000 troops were sent to work on the Zipingpu Dam.

Dujiangyan is just north of the provincial capital of Chengdu. It was rattled by Monday's earthquake with buildings collapsing and services cut off. The city is not far from Wenchuan, the epicenter of the 7.9-magnitude quake.

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The National Development Reform Commission, China's top economic planning body, said on its Web site Wednesday that the earthquake had damaged 391 dams. It said two of the dams were large ones, 28 were medium-sized and the rest were small ones. It did not give any other details or say if Zipingpu was one of the dams.

In a separate report, Xinhua quoted the Ministry of Water Resources as urging protection of the Zipingpu Reservoir between Dujiangyan and Wenchuan.

It said Dujiangyan would be "swamped" if major problems emerged at the dam. But Xinhua said the ministry had set up an emergency command center at the dam "to discharge the reservoir's rising waters and guarantee that the damage posed no threat to Dujiangyan and the neighboring Chengdu Plain."

Death toll rises
Meantime, military helicopters dropped food and medicine to earthquake survivors who remained cut off Wednesday in remote mountain villages behind roads clogged by landslides, while the official death toll rose to nearly 15,000.

The official Xinhua News Agency said Wednesday that nearly 26,000 people were still buried under debris and another 14,000 people remain missing. Those figures are in addition to the official death toll, the Xinhua said.

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