Death toll climbs after quakes rock China

Updated September 08, 2012 11:58:03

At least 80 people were killed when two shallow magnitude-5.6 earthquakes struck south-west China, state media reported.

The quakes struck near the border of Yunnan and Guizhou provinces, the first one at 11.19 am (local time) and the second one about 45 minutes later.

State television footage showed hundreds of people gathered on the streets in the town of Yiliang, in Yunnan, which appeared to have been worst hit.

Footage also showed boulder-covered roadways, abandoned cars and black smoke pouring from buildings. Most of the victims were from Yiliang county.

By mid-afternoon, authorities had moved more than 100,000 people from the two regions as a series of more than 60 aftershocks struck.

Xinhua said 20,000 houses had collapsed or been damaged and about 700 people had been injured.

As the number of dead climbed throughout the day, state media reported that premier Wen Jiabao would travel to the area, as he has often done when disasters strike Chinese regions.

President Hu Jintao called for disaster relief to be dispatched to the area while attending the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in the Russian city of Vladivostok.

"The hardest part of the rescue now is traffic. Roads are blocked and rescuers have to climb the mountains to reach hard-hit villages," Xinhua quoted Li Fuchun, an official from Luozehe, the town at the epicentre of the quake, as saying.

The death toll may rise as rescuers reach villages cut off by landslides, the news agency said.

Local residents described how people ran out of buildings screaming as the quake hit.

"I was walking on the street when I suddenly felt the ground shaking beneath me," posted one on Sina Weibo, a microblogging service similar to Twitter.

"People started rushing outside screaming. It still scares me to think of it now."

Another Weibo user who was driving when the quake hit said he felt the road shake beneath him and struggled to keep hold of the steering wheel.

Photographs posted online showed streets strewn with debris from damaged buildings.

Calls to police stations and hospitals in Yiliang went unanswered, but a worker at No. 2 Renmin Hospital in Zhaotong city said medical staff were busy treating the injured.

"We have admitted injured people, but don't have an overall number yet, and we can't comment without government approval," he told Reuters, declining to give his name.

The largest quake, which was also felt in neighbouring Sichuan province, was followed by several other tremors.

South-west China is prone to quakes. In May 2008 a magnitude-8.0 quake rocked Sichuan and parts of neighbouring Shaanxi and Gansu provinces, killing tens of thousands and flattening swathes of the province.


Topics: earthquake, disasters-and-accidents, china

First posted September 07, 2012 16:19:37