A powerful earthquake toppled buildings, schools and chemical plants in central China, killing about 10,000 people in the country's worst quake in three decades.

China in 'all-out' quake effort - 12 / 05 / 2008 13:21

The 7.9-magnitude quake devastated a region of small cities and towns set amid steep hills north of Sichuan's provincial capital of Chengdu on Monday.

Striking in midafternoon, it emptied office buildings across the country in Beijing and could be felt as far away as Vietnam. As Tuesday dawned, rescuers were frantically searching for more survivors, but rain was compounding the difficulty.

Premier Wen Jiabao, who flew to the region, said rain was forecast for the next several days. Snippets from state media and photos posted on the Internet underscored the immense scale of the devastation. In the town of Juyuan, south of the epicenter, a three-story high school collapsed, burying as many as 900 students and killing at least 50, the official Xinhua news agency said.

Photos showed people using cranes, mechanical hoists and their hands to remove slabs of concrete and steel.

Buried teenagers struggled to break free from the rubble, "while others were crying out for help," Xinhua said. Families waited in the rain near the wreckage as rescuers wrote the names of the dead on a blackboard, Xinhua said. Parents of the dead students built makeshift religious altars at the site, resting the corpses on any available piece of plywood or cardboard, and burning paper money and incense in a traditional honor for their child in the afterlife, according to NPR's Melissa Block.

 The earthquake hit one of the last homes of the giant panda at the Wolong Nature Reserve and panda breeding center, in Wenchuan county, which remained out of contact, Xinhua said.

 In Chengdu, it crashed telephone networks and hours later left parts of the city of 10 million in darkness.

The overall death toll increased to about 10,000, the official Xinhua News Agency reported Tuesday.

 It said nearly 10,000 people died in central China's Sichuan province alone and 300 others in three other provinces and the mega-city of Chongqing. Worst affected were four counties including the quake's epicenter in Wenchuan, 60 miles northwest of Chengdu.

Landslides left roads impassable Tuesday, causing the government to order soldiers into the area on foot, state television said, and heavy rain prevented four military helicopters from landing.

Wenchuan's Communist Party secretary appealed for air drops of tents, food and medicine. "We also need medical workers to save the injured people here," Xinhua quoted Wang Bin as telling other officials who reached him by phone.

To the east, in Beichuan county, 80 percent of the buildings fell, and 10,000 people were injured, aside from 3,000 to 5,000 dead, Xinhua said. State media said two chemical plants in an industrial zone of the city of Shifang collapsed, spilling more than 80 tons of toxic liquid ammonia.

The news agency said about 600 people died in Shifang and up to 2,300 were buried by rubble. Though slow to release information at first, the government and its state media ramped up quickly.

Nearly 20,000 soldiers, police and reservists were sent to the disaster area. Wen, a geologist by training, said a push was on to clear roads and restore electricity as soon as possible. "The disaster was more serious than predicted.

The rescue sites are very complex. But the public (here) will have hope as long as they see people coming to help," he said.

International Olympic Committee President Jacques Rogge sent his condolences to President Hu Jintao, adding: "The Olympic Movement is at your side, especially during these difficult moments. Our thoughts are with you."

The quake was the deadliest since one in 1976 in the city of Tangshan near Beijing that killed 240,000 — although some reports say as many as 655,000 perished — the most devastating in modern history. A 1933 quake near where Monday's struck killed at least 9,000, according to geologists.

AP