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China’s most devastating earthquake in three decades caused a wide swath of damage, sending people fleeing with their few salvaged belongings. Earthquake rescue experts in orange jumpsuits extricated bloody survivors on stretchers from demolished buildings, and some 34,000 troops swarmed into the region to help.
The US Geological Survey said on its website the main quake struck at 0628 GMT at a depth of 6 miles.
A day after the powerful 7.9 magnitude quake struck Monday afternoon, state media said rescue workers had reached the epicenter in Wenchuan county — where the number of casualties was still unknown.
The death toll rose Tuesday to 11,921, said Wang Zhenyao, disaster relief division director at the Ministry of Civil Affairs. At least 4,800 people remained buried in Mianzhu, 60 miles (100 kilometers) from the epicenter, Xinhua said, citing local authorities.
“The road started swaying as I was driving. Rocks fell from the mountains, with dust darkening the sky over the valley,” a driver for Sichuan’s seismological bureau was quoted by Xinhua as saying, as he was driving near the epicentre.
As many as 10,000 in Beichuan were feared injured and 80 per cent of the buildings there had been destroyed, Xinhua said. There had been more than 300 aftershocks and an estimated 3,000 to 5,000 people were killed in Beichuan Qiang Autonomous County alone, state media said.
Beichuan’s population is 161,000, meaning about one in 10 residents were killed or injured. The county is a part of Mianyang city, and about 100 miles from the provincial capital, Chengdu.
Hundreds of people were buried under rubble in Shifang in Sichuan as several schools, factories and dormitories collapsed during the quake, the official Xinhua news agency said.
About 6,000 people were evacuated, Xinhua said, adding that more than 80 tonnes of highly corrosive liquid ammonia had leaked.
At least 45 had died in Chengdu, Xinhua said, citing an official with the local seismological bureau. Another 600 people were injured, 58 of them critically, in the sprawling city.
Some 57 have been confirmed killed in northern Shaanxi, 48 in northwestern Gansu, 50 in Chongqing municipality, and one in Yunnan province, Xinhua said, citing the national headquarters of disaster relief.
In Beijing and Shanghai, office workers poured into the streets as the tremor hit. In the capital, there was no visible damage and the showpiece Bird’s Nest Olympic stadium was unscathed.
It has come at a bad time for China, which holds the Olympic Games in August, and has been struggling to keep a lid on unrest in ethnic Tibetan areas and the heavily Muslim northeastern Xinjiang region.
The quake was China’s deadliest since 1976, when 240,000 people were killed in the city of Tangshan, near Beijing in 1976. Financial analysts said the quake would have only a limited impact on the country’s booming economy.
