CHONGQING (China), May 12: China’s most devastating earthquake in three decades killed nearly 9,000 people in western Sichuan province on Monday, toppled buildings across a wide area, trapped hundreds of students under the rubble of schools and caused a toxic chemical leak.
The 7.8 magnitude earthquake has disrupted transport and communications networks. State media citing the Sichuan seismology bureau reported 313 aftershocks.
Speaking at the disaster relief headquarters in Dujiangyan, 100kms from the quake’s epicentre, Chinese premier Wen Jiabao said the situation in the quake-hit areas was more serious than previously estimated.
“The situation is worse than we previously estimated and we need more people here to help.”
Rescuers were cut off from the epicentre in Wenchuan, a county of 112,000 people about 100 kilometres from the provincial capital Chengdu, Xinhua news agency said. The death toll may rise significantly.
More than 7,000 of the dead were in Sichuan’s Beichuan Qiang Autonomous County, where 80 per cent of the buildings were destroyed, state media and Xinhua said.
The earthquake was felt as far away as Bangkok in Thailand, 1,800km from the epicentre, and Vietnam, in Beijing 1,500km to the north, Shanghai, 1,700km to the southwest and in Anhui province, about 1,100km to the east. In the capital, the showpiece Bird’s Nest Olympic stadium was unscathed.
The national disaster relief headquarters reported 48 killed in northwestern Gansu province, 50 in the municipality of Chongqing, 61 in Shaanxi province and one in southwestern Yunnan, Xinhua said citing the national headquarters of disaster relief. About 10,000 people were injured, the provincial disaster relief headquarters reported.
All of those provinces and Chongqing, a special municipality of more than 30 million people, border Sichuan.
Xinhua quoted a spokesman for the China Seismological Bureau as saying that tremors were reported in Beijing, Shanghai, and Chongqing Municipalities, Ningxia, Qinghai, Gansu, Shanxi, Shaanxi, Shandong, Yunnan, Hunan, Hubei, Yunnan, Guizhou, Henan and Jiangsu provinces, and Tibet Autonomous Region.
“We are doing everything we can, but the roads are blanketed with rocks and boulders,” Sichuan’s deputy party chief Li Chongxi said.
Most phone lines in Wenchuan were down and a website for the region’s Aba prefecture said the quake had cut several major highways and communications were largely severed in 11 counties.
“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 near the epicentre.
Beichuan, part of Sichuan’s Mianyang city about 160km from capital Chengdu, has a population of 161,000, meaning about one in 10 residents were killed or injured.
About 900 teenagers were buried in the rubble of a collapsed three-storey school building in the Sichuan city of Dujiangyan.
Local villagers had helped dozens of students out of the ruins and cranes were excavating the site as parents looked on, Xinhua said.
CRYING FOR HELP: “Some teenagers are struggling to get out … others are crying for help,” the agency said.
Hundreds of people were trapped under collapsed schools, factories and dormitories in Shifang in Sichuan, Xinhua said, including several hundreds trapped beneath two collapsed chemical plants.
Some 80 tonnes of highly corrosive liquid ammonia had leaked in Shifang, forcing the evacuation of 6,000 people, it said.
Hundreds of people were buried under a collapsed hospital in Dujiangyan.
Troops started pouring into the region with sniffer dogs, life detection equipment, and some firefighters carrying explosives to blow up rocks piled on the roads, state television said.
Landslides had cut off three major rail lines leading to Chengdu, stranding 31 passenger trains and 149 cargo trains, Xinhua said.
The National Tourism Administration had ordered travel agencies to halt tour groups to or through the quake area.
FELT IN BANGKOK: The Sichuan plain is one of China’s most fertile areas, but it relies heavily on an irrigation system linked to the 2,000-year-old Dujiangyan flood control works – which means the quake could exacerbate inflation, already running at the fastest pace in 12 years.
The quake is also the worst to hit China in 32 years since the 1976 Tangshan earthquake in northeastern China where up to 300,000 died.
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 US Geological Survey said the main quake struck at 0628 GMT (11:28 Pakistan time) at a depth of 10 kilometres.
President Hu Jintao has ordered an all-out rescue effort, Xinhua reported. –Agencies
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