7.9-Magnitude Temblor, Centered in Sichuan, Is Country's Worst in
Decades
[Map: Earthquake in Sichuan Province, China]
The death toll exceeded 12,000 and was expected to rise as rescue efforts continued and the scope of the damage became clearer, particularly in hard-hit Sichuan province. The official New China News Agency reported that more than 18,000 were trapped under debris in Mianyang City. Another 2,000 people were found dead and 4,800 were missing in the little town of Mianzhu, near the quake's epicenter in Wenchuan county, the news agency reported.
The quake measured 7.9 on the Richter scale as it rolled through a half-dozen Chinese provinces and rattled buildings as far away as Vietnam.
Several mid-afternoon aftershocks jarred Chengdu, the Sichuan provincial capital, sending thousands of office workers and residents into the streets in a repeat of Monday's panic. Dozens of families were seen camping under red, white and blue tarps beside the Funan River in the city center.
More than 1,000 rescuers reached Wenchuan county, about 60 miles north of Chengdu, after battling their way over fallen trees and buckled roads for about 24 hours, the official agency said. Once in the worst-damaged area, they fanned out to villages and towns trying to assess the scope of the damage and calculate a death toll that officials feared could rise in the days ahead.
Before the rescue teams' arrival, the county Communist Party secretary, Wang Bin, made a widely reported appeal over a satellite telephone for immediate airdrops of food, medicine and tents to care for what he estimated were 30,000 people left homeless by the destruction in Wenchuan township, the county seat. "We are in urgent need of supplies, especially doctors," he said.
More than 30,000 People's Liberation Army troops along with People's Armed Police and army reservists joined civilian rescue teams, the government announced. But helicopters dispatched to bring help to destroyed villages in the mountainous terrain near the Wolong giant panda reserve were forced to turn back because of heavy fog and driving rain, the New China News Agency reported. Similarly, paratroopers who had planned to parachute in called off their mission because of the weather.
Premier Wen Jiabao, who was on scene directing rescue efforts, was seen bowing three times in a ritual of respect for the dead before the ruins of a collapsed school in the town of Dujiangyan, not far from the epicenter, the official news agency said. Wen declared that the soldiers, police and other rescuers should make clearing roads to reach those pinned under the rubble their top priority.
Wen, who flew in from Beijing soon after the scale of the disaster became apparent, has been photographed and televised repeatedly handing down orders to rescue workers and shouting encouragement to victims. His display of concern, and its swift reporting by the official media, was in marked contrast to the secretive way the Communist Party has handled emergencies in the past.
The toll of China's deadliest earthquake, a tremor at Tangshan in 1976 that killed about 240,000, was considered a state secret for years. But since the Sichuan quake struck at 2:28 Monday afternoon, government officials have provided regular updates for distribution by the New China News Agency and China's controlled broadcast news programs have covered the tragedy intensely.
The party leadership announced in Beijing that its elite Politburo Standing Committee held a meeting with President Hu Jintao in command to make sure the government went all-out to save as many people as possible. "Time is life," a Standing Committee statement said.
An estimated 900 eighth- and ninth-grade students and their teachers were trapped in the Dujiangyan school where Wen paid his respects, officials told reporters. Another school with up to 1,000 students and teachers inside collapsed in Mianyang, in Beichuan county, about 20 miles to the northeast, the state news agency said. Wire services quoted the state news agency as saying that more than 18,600 people were buried under debris in Mianyang, and 3,629 people had been confirmed dead there.
About 60 bodies were pulled from under the rubble in Dujiangyan, according to an Associated Press reporter on the scene Monday. He said families shouted at a cordon of soldiers surrounding the collapsed building, demanding to know the fate of their children. With communications down in much of the affected area, precise official information was not available.
Li Jian, a 32-year-old restaurant owner who lives several miles away, said Dujiangyan townspeople were at the end of their rope because most spent the night outdoors under a cold mountain rain. "It was raining hard," he said by telephone. "We couldn't sleep. People were scared. And today, still, there were small earthquakes all through the day."
The Health Ministry in Beijing, meanwhile, issued an appeal for blood to treat the victims. The Finance Ministry said it has allocated $123 million dollars as an initial budget for rescue efforts.
Despite the disaster here in Sichuan, the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games sought to reassure potential foreign visitors that they would be safe during the Beijing Games in August. Zhang Jian, director of the committee's project management department, stressed to reporters in the capital that the quake area is a long way from Beijing and would have no effect on the games.
In any case, the Olympic venues, none of which were damaged, have been constructed to withstand earthquakes with an intensity of up to 8 on the Richter scale, according to Li Zhangjun, deputy director of the Olympic media center.
The quake collapsed buildings across eight provinces, though most of the damage appeared to be in Sichuan, where as many as 5,000 people died and 10,000 were injured in one county alone, state media reported. "People were terrified," said Huang Shi Hua, who had just watched rescuers loading victims into ambulances near the city of Chongqing, where a primary school had collapsed, killing four children.
The earthquake struck at 2:28 p.m. and was centered 55 miles northwest of Chengdu, according to China's State Seismological Bureau. More than 1,000 aftershocks jolted the region, state media reported. Nearly 1,000 miles away in Beijing, workers poured into the streets as office towers swayed.
An estimated 50,000 soldiers, police and reservists were dispatched to the area to provide aid as President Hu called for "all-out" efforts to rescue quake victims. The deployment of the military, in particular, sent a signal of urgency in a country that carefully calibrates the use of its armed forces.
Rescuers, meanwhile, worked through the night to locate victims and provide medical care.
Li Jing, general engineer of China's National Disaster Reduction Center, said the full scale of the devastation is unclear because communication and transportation links to mountainous Sichuan province were badly damaged. He said rescuers will place a priority on getting water and medicine to the affected regions as quickly as possible to minimize the loss of life.
Cellphone communication in the area failed after 2,300 base stations and five power plants shut down, officials said. Chengdu airport closed and flights throughout the country were disrupted. In Beichuan county, up to 80 percent of the buildings collapsed.
A rescue team set out for Wenchuan on foot at 10 p.m. Monday, walked through the night and arrived on Tuesday. Li Chongxi, a high-level Communist Party official in Sichuan, attempted to lead an earlier rescue team to Wenchuan but could not get through. "We are doing everything we can, but the roads are blanketed with rocks and boulders," he told the state news agency.
The massive Three Gorges Dam, a few hundred miles away, was not affected by the quake, state media quoted an official as saying. Two chemical plants in Shifang city were reportedly flattened, burying hundreds of workers and spilling more than 80 tons of toxic liquid ammonia.
A Chengdu resident said the ground shook for several minutes and tall buildings swayed in the city of 10.7 million people. He saw one building shift position and begin leaning after the quake ended, but he said it had not fallen.
Chen Liangcai, in Sichuan's Deyang city, said the quake felt like "sitting on a train going through a hard turn." State media reported that five schools collapsed in the city, trapping an unknown number of students. Chen said local officials advised residents not to go inside their homes to sleep, but to spend the night outside.
Experts said many of the buildings were not built to withstand the impact of such a severe earthquake. In the four hours after the main quake, many other, smaller quakes were recorded by the U.S. Geological Survey. Experts said aftershocks could be just as deadly as the main quake because they put new strains on already damaged structures.
One Deyang shopkeeper, who declined to give her name, said she was advised to stay in her shop and not return home for the night. Rattled after having watched dozens of ambulances race by all afternoon, she said she would do as she was told. But she devised her own early warning system by putting a piece of metal in a glass; if she noticed it trembling, she said, she would run from the shop.
A reporter for National Public Radio who was in Chengdu at the time of the quake reported that tens of thousands of people had rushed into the streets, fearing that buildings would collapse. Many people remained in the streets for several hours, she said; stores closed and did not reopen.
Tang Yi, an office clerk in Chengdu, said local government vehicles were patrolling the streets about midnight, broadcasting from loudspeakers that residents should not panic. Tang said most of the people in his neighborhood were spending the night camped out in a local square. He saw some buildings with large cracks and others whose ceramic tiles had fallen off.
In Xian, panicked residents across the city filled the streets as buildings shook. Strong aftershocks continued for more than an hour as stores, shopping malls and restaurants across the city shuttered. Many of the city's 13 million residents fled for the countryside, according to residents.
Zhang Guomin, a researcher at China's Seismological Bureau, said the damage was so great because the quake was shallow, about six miles below the earth's surface. Earthquakes less than 19 miles below the ground release 85 percent of their energy to the surface, Zhang told the state news agency.
Researchers Liu Liu and Liu Songjie contributed to this report.