AT LEAST 600 people are dead and thousands injured after a series of powerful earthquakes shook a remote Tibetan region in western China, burying many in the wreckage of their traditional mud and wood homes.
The disaster came as a volley of powerful earthquakes – the first of which, with a magnitude of 6.9 according to the US Geological Survey, struck at 7.49am yesterday in the Yushu prefecture, a Tibetan trading centre known for its horse festival in the southern part of Qinghai. A second tremor followed 10 minutes later, at magnitude 5.3, followed after two minutes by a 5.2 quake.
The aftershocks have been coming with terrifying regularity. There have been 18 subsequent quakes, according to the China Earthquake Networks Centre, and further aftershocks measuring more than magnitude 6 are likely over the coming days.
TV footage showed devastated Tibetan-style houses in the town of Jiegu, and uprooted public buildings, with hundreds of soldiers struggling to dig out survivors with shovels as no excavators were available. Yushu has 100,000 residents, and 97 per cent of them are Tibetan.
A major challenge for rescue workers is how to release water from a reservoir, in which a crack has formed. There are fears it could burst and flood the area.
More than 5,000 extra rescuers, including soldiers and medical staff, are racing to the area.
This is a poor region, and the hospitals are stretched to the limit. Medical equipment is in short supply and doctors overwhelmed.
The provincial government said it was rushing 5,000 tents and 100,000 coats and blankets to the mountainous region, which is about 4,000m above sea level, where night-time temperatures fall below freezing.
Zhouhuaxia, a spokesman for the Yushu local government, told the Xinhua news agency that more than 85 per cent of the houses in Jiegu had collapsed, and he said there were panicked scenes in the town.
“The streets in Jiegu are thronged with panic, injured people, with many bleeding in the head. Many students are buried under the debris due to building collapse at a vocational school. A large crack appears in the wall of the Yushu Hotel, and part of a government office building also collapsed,” he said.
“I can see injured people everywhere. The biggest problem now is that we lack tents, we lack medical equipment, medicine and medical workers,” he said.
A teacher surnamed Chang at the Yushu primary school told Xinhua that all the buildings in the school had collapsed, and five students at the boarding school, which has about 1,000 students, had died. “Morning sessions did not begin when the quake happened. Some pupils ran out of dorms alive, and those who had not escaped in time were buried,” Mr Chang said.
A major problem for the rescuers is the sheer remoteness of the area. The epicentre is at a village called Rima, which is 48km west of Jiegu.
The provincial capital of Qinghai, Xining, is 800km away.
An airport was opened at nearby Batang last year, but it is believed to have been badly damaged in the quake. Many telephone lines are down, making communication difficult.
Many of the houses in this area are built of mud and wood, and a local TV journalist Karsum Nyima told of how they collapsed after the first quake.
The area has suffered many earthquakes over the years: in 1927, an 8.6 magnitude earthquake killed 200,000 people.
China’s last major earthquake was a magnitude 7.9 quake in Sichuan province in 2008, which left almost 90,000 people dead or missing.
“In a flash, the houses went down. It was a terrible earthquake,” the journalist told CCTV. “In a small park, there is a Buddhist tower and the top of the tower fell off . . . Everybody is out on the streets, standing in front of their houses, trying to find their family members.” The rescuers had only limited emergency equipment, a soldier named Shi Huajie told CCTV. “Many of the people have been buried, and our soldiers are trying to pull them out with human labour. It is very difficult to save people with our bare hands.”
