China Quake Deaths Top 12,000

William Foreman in Chengdu, China
Associated Press

May 13, 2008

A powerful earthquake toppled buildings, schools, and chemical plants Monday in central China, killing more than 12,000 people and trapping untold numbers in mounds of concrete, steel and earth in the country's worst quake in three decades.

The magnitude 7.9 quake devastated a region of small cities and towns set amid steep hills north of Sichuan's provincial capital of Chengdu. Striking in the middle of the day, 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.

The government was pouring in troops to aid in the disaster recovery. Xinhua said 16,000 were in the area and 34,000 more were en route.

Immense Devastation

Snippets from state media and photos posted on the Internet underscored the immense scale of the devastation.

(See photos of the quake's aftermath.)

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.

The news agency reported on Tuesday that another thousand students and teachers were buried and feared dead when a high school collapsed in Beichuan county. The building was reduced to a pile of rubble, it said.

Buried teenagers struggled to break free from the rubble in Juyuan, "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, according to the agency.

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

Worst affected were four counties including the quake's epicenter in Wenchuan, 60 miles (97 kilometers) northwest of Chengdu.

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.

Though slow to release information at first, the government and its state media ramped up quickly.

Added Pressure

Disasters always pose a test for the communist government, whose mandate rests heavily on maintaining order, delivering economic growth, and providing relief in emergencies.

Pressure for a rapid response was particularly intense this year, with the government already grappling with public discontent over high inflation and a widespread uprising among Tibetans in western China while trying to prepare for the upcoming Beijing Olympics.

"I am particularly saddened by the number of students and children affected by this tragedy," U.S. President Bush said in a statement.

U.S. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said no aid requests had been made by China.

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.