Jiegu, China (News Terupdate) - Rescuers prepared to airlift hundreds of injured people Thursday from the earthquake zone to hospitals as the massive rescue effort continued in China.
The death toll for Wednesday's 6.9-magnitude quake rose to 617, state-run CCTV reported. More than 9,000 people had been injured and 313 were missing.
The rescue effort was hampered by unstable bridges and collapsed roadways, making it difficult for heavy equipment to get to hard-hit areas like Jiegu, the town nearest the epicenter.
But rescuers were able to pull four survivors from a collapsed guest house in the area Thursday afternoon, state-run television reported. The rescue occurred after five hours of digging.
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Authorities have said that more than 1,000 people have been saved in similar rescues.
The quake shook the region shortly before 8 a.m. Wednesday (Tuesday 8 p.m. ET), when many residents were still at home and schools were just getting started for the day.
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Qinghai province in northwestern China, home to about five million people, is considered a gateway to Himalayan Tibet. More than half its people are Han Chinese, but the area is home to more than 40 different ethnic groupings, including Tibetans, Hui and Mongols.
Jiegu is in Yushu prefecture, a Tibetan region with a population of about 350,000 people -- about a third of whom live in Jiegu. Most are poor, making their living as farmers and herdsmen.
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But the region is also rich in natural gas and marked by copper, tin and coal mines. The region has a long history of earthquakes -- 53 with a magnitude of 5.0 or greater since 2001, according to China's Earthquake Administration.
One Jiegu resident told CNN that when his house began to shake, he grabbed his family and ran outside. Then came another quake, and his house collapsed. His family is now in tents, he said, but he had managed to buy water. He said they had seen no government assistance.
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People were living in fear, the man said, and some were headed up into the mountains to escape the threat of flooding should the reservoir -- also cracked in the quake -- break.
More than 85 percent of the mostly wooden and earth-walled houses in Gyegu had collapsed, a prefecture official told Xinhua. In Yushu, 90 percent of the houses collapsed, leaving many homeless, the Hong Kong Red Cross said. Temperatures in the area are forecast to be around the freezing mark at night, the Red Cross said, so "provision of emergency shelters for the victims remains a high priority."
Source : CNN
Sunday, April 18, 2010
China prepares to airlift hundreds from quake zone
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