Strong Quake Kills Hundreds in Western China

[phongn]

Strong Quake Kills Hundreds in Western China

BEIJING — A powerful earthquake in western China killed at least 400 people, injured 10,000 and left many buried under debris on Wednesday, Chinese state media reported.

The quake, which struck at 7:49 a.m. in Qinghai Province, bordering Tibet, had a magnitude of 7.1, according to China’s earthquake agency. At least 18 aftershocks measuring more than 6.0 followed throughout the day, government officials said, according to Xinhua. The Xinhua Web site, in English China’s earthquake agency said the quake centered on Yushu County, a remote and mountainous area sparsely populated by farmers and herdsmen, most of them ethnic Tibetans. The region, pocked with copper, tin and coal mines, is also rich in natural gas.

As with the devastating earthquake two years ago that killed 87,000 in neighboring Sichuan Province, many buildings collapsed, including schools. But with Qinghai’s far smaller and less densely grouped population, the toll is likely to remain far lower.

A seismologist, Gu Guohua, said in an interview with the national broadcaster CCTV that 90 percent of the homes in the county seat, Jeigu, had collapsed. The houses, he said, were of “quite poor quality,” with many constructed of wood, mud and brick.

Among those still missing were 20 children buried in the wreckage of a primary school, and as many as 50 people were trapped beneath a collapsed office building that houses the Departments of Commerce and Industry, according to news reports.

“We’re in the process of trying to rescue the students,” Kang Zifu, a local fire department official, told CCTV on Wednesday afternoon. “We’re hurrying to help them.”

He said at least 32 survivors had been pulled from the debris.

The prefecture that includes Yushu is located on the Tibetan plateau, with a population that is more than 96 percent Tibetan and overwhelmingly poor. Many villages sit well above 16,000 feet, with freezing temperatures not uncommon in mid-April. By Wednesday evening, temperatures in the county seat had already dropped to 27 degrees.

China National Radio, citing an official with the local Red Cross Society of China, said that 70 percent of the school buildings had collapsed in neighboring Yushu Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, an area the size of South Korea that has a population of 350,000. But at least some of the schools had not begun classes yet.

Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency, quoted a teacher surnamed Chang who said 5 of the 1,000 students at Yushu Primary School had died.

“Buildings in our school were all toppled,” Mr. Chang said. “Morning sessions had not begun when the quake happened. Some pupils ran out of the dorm alive, and those who had not escaped in time were buried.”

Karsum Nyima, an employee of a local television station in Yushu, told CCTV, that Tuesday’s quake had sent people running into the streets not long after daybreak.

“All of a sudden, the houses collapsed,” he said. “It was a terrible earthquake. In the park, a Buddhist pagoda fell down. Everyone is in the street in front of their houses. They are trying to find family members.”

In the same broadcast, Wu Yong, an officer in the Chinese Army, said that the road to the airport was impassable and that soldiers were digging people out from collapsed homes by hand.

“The most important thing now is that this place is far from everything, with few accessible rescue troops available,” Mr. Wu said. “I feel like the number of dead and injured will keep going up.”

Officials said that rescue efforts were stymied by a lack of heavy equipment. Medical supplies and tents, they added, were in short supply. Phone calls to local government offices went unanswered on Wednesday afternoon.

State news media reported that 700 paramilitary officers were already working in the quake zone and that more than 4,000 others would be sent to assist in search and rescue efforts. The Civil Affairs Ministry said it would also send 5,000 tents and 100,000 coats and blankets.

Workers also were rushing to release water from a reservoir after cracks were discovered in a dam, according to the China Earthquake Administration.

Genqiu Renqin, a teacher who lives in Sichuan Province, about 60 miles from Yushu, said he felt the earth shake on Wednesday morning and immediately drove to see if relatives who live near the epicenter were safe.

“Almost all of their homes were badly damaged, but luckily no one was seriously injured,” he said, speaking by phone from a town about 25 miles from the county seat. “All the people in the area are camping out for now.”

The affected area is part of a seismically active zone. Last August, Golmud, a city to the northwest of Yushu, was hit by a 6.2 magnitude earthquake that destroyed dozens of homes but caused no deaths.

The epicenter of the quake Wednesday was related to the northward thrust of the Indian Plate against the Eurasian Plate, the same root of the Sichuan quake.

Xiyun Yang, Li Bibo and Zhang Jing contributed research.

[Zor]

An Utterly Tragic loss in Human Life. I hope the PLA, PAP and other organizations can save as many lives as they can.

Zor

[Kodiak]

Death toll is now up around 600. Have we reached a statistically anomalous number of Magnitude 7.0+ quakes yet?

Jiegu, China (CNN) -- Unstable bridges and collapsed roadways kept rescuers and their heavy equipment away Thursday from Jiegu, China -- the town nearest the epicenter of a 6.9 magnitude earthquake that killed nearly 600 people and injured thousands more.

Twenty-four hours after the Wednesday quake, most of Jiegu's dead were in the dusty rubble of a hotel that crumbled under the strain of the initial quake and a series of strong aftershocks. Residents painstakingly picked through the debris with shovels and ropes, ever mindful that time is a formidable obstacle to finding survivors.

"We have to mainly rely on our hands to clear away the debris as we have no large excavating machines," police officer Shi Huajie told the state-run news agency Xinhua.

Injured survivors aren't clear of difficulty either -- the remote, mountainous and impoverished region in Qinghai province has few doctors and rapidly dwindling medical supplies.

And then there was the lack of electrical power -- the quakes cracked a hydroelectric power plant, forcing authorities to shut it down, making even a nearby airport unusable until portable generators could go online.

Chinese President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao ordered local authorities to "go all out to save the disaster-stricken people," Xinhua said. Vice Premier Hui Liangyu was dispatched to the region.

The quake shook the region shortly before 8 a.m. Wednesday (Tuesday 8 p.m. ET), when many residents were still at home and schools were just getting started for the day. Nearly 60 of the dead were students at several schools in the province, authorities told Xinhua, and more than 50 are trapped in the debris with little chance of rescue.

Xinhua reported that 25 students were rescued from a vocational school, and another 23 from a primary school.

"Our top priority is to save students," Kang Zifu, an army officer in Jiegu, told Xinhua. "Schools are always places that have many people."

China's state run CCTV reported that more than 1,000 people had been rescued, but authorities said they expected the death toll to rise.

Qinghai province in northwestern China, home to about five million people, is considered a gateway to Himalayan Tibet. More than half its people are Han Chinese, but the area is home to more than 40 different ethnic groupings, including Tibetans, Hui and Mongols.

iegu is in Yushu prefecture, a Tibetan region with a population of about 350,000 people -- about a third of whom live in Jiegu. Most are poor, making their living as farmers and herdsmen. But the region is also rich in natural gas and marked by copper, tin and coal mines.

The region has a long history of earthquakes, 53 with a magnitude of 5.0 or greater since 2001, according to China's Earthquake Administration.

One Jiegu resident told CNN that when his house began to shake, he grabbed his family and ran outside. Then came another quake, and his house collapsed. His family is now in tents, he said, but he had managed to buy water. He said they had seen no government assistance.

People were living in fear, the man said, and some were headed up into the mountains to escape the threat of flooding should the reservoir -- also cracked in the quake -- break.

More than 85 percent of the mostly wooden and earth-walled houses in Gyegu had collapsed, a prefecture official told Xinhua. In Yushu, 90 percent of the houses collapsed, leaving many homeless, the Hong Kong Red Cross said. Temperatures in the area are forecast to be around the freezing mark at night, the Red Cross said, so "provision of emergency shelters for the victims remains a high priority."