AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
Lushan, China
Thousands of rescue workers combed through flattened villages in southwest China on Sunday in a race to find survivors from a powerful quake as the toll of dead and missing rose past 200.
Dressed in bright orange uniforms, rescuers battled their way up mountain paths strewn with wreckage to reach isolated parts of Sichuan province on the edge of the Tibetan Plateau.
Army troops dressed in camouflage worked through the night, searching villages where houses had been destroyed for survivors and treating those injured in the quake.
China’s new Premier Li Keqiang has rushed to the disaster zone and was shown by state broadcaster CCTV eating breakfast in a tent. He told state media that “the rescue effort is our first duty.” Li said on Saturday that the first 24 hours was “the golden time for saving lives,” as China’s new leaders respond to a fresh disaster five years after another Sichuan earthquake left more than 90,000 people dead or missing.
But the rescue operation was hampered by huge queues of traffic—some stretching back for 20 kilometers—clogging roads into the disaster zone.
“We really want to go in and help people, but instead we are waiting in traffic,” one frustrated relief official said in his car, as large numbers of volunteer rescuers from local communities tried to head to the zone.
Boulders the size of cars littered streets in Lushan county, the epicenter of the earthquake. “Three people died in that building, and no one wants to live in this area any more because it is too dangerous,” a 45-year-old man surnamed Yang told Agence-France Presse (AFP), surrounded by rubble from the quake.
More than 1,100 aftershocks have followed since the quake struck Sichuan province on Saturday morning. Chinese seismologists registered the tremor at 7.0 magnitude while the US Geological Survey gave it as 6.6.
At least 179 people have been confirmed dead, 24 are missing and nearly 11,500 were injured, the Ministry of Civil Affairs said.
Firefighters helped by sniffer dogs have pulled 91 people alive from the rubble, the Xinhua news agency said, citing the Ministry of Public Security.
At Lushan People’s Hospital, a steady stream of ambulances continued to arrive in the early hours of Sunday. Most victims were taken to tents erected in the grounds of the hospital, where doctors treated the wounded.
A 68-year-old woman with a broken arm spoke of the terror she experienced when the earthquake struck.
“It was as if the mountain was alive,” she told AFP. “Now I have no home to go. So I don’t know what I am going to do.”
Quake-prone Japan, which has been mired in tension with China over a high-seas territorial dispute, offered any help that is required.
“Japan is ready to offer its maximum support,” Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said in a message to Chinese President Xi Jinping and Premier Li, according to Japan’s foreign ministry.
China responded that overseas assistance was not needed at the moment but that it would contact Japan if that changes, the ministry said.
More than 17,000 Chinese soldiers and police have joined the rescue mission and five drones were sent to capture aerial images, Xinhua said, as well as aircraft carrying out rescue and relief work. A military vehicle carrying 17 troops headed for the quake area plummeted over a cliff on Saturday, killing one soldier and injuring seven others.
Wu Yong sobs as fellow villagers carry away his teenage boy’s coffin, after a terrifying tremor in the mountains of southwest China robbed him of the only son he is likely ever to have.
“I saw my son but I couldn’t save him,” the 42-year-old said, recalling the moment he rushed from the living room to his boy’s bedroom to discover him buried under rubble.
“I called him and he answered two times... but I couldn’t save him,” Wu added, his house totally caved in, as friends tried to comfort him.
His 38-year-old wife Yue Yingcui collapsed in the street moments earlier, screaming in grief as neighbors and friends struggled to hold her in their arms.
She had just seen villagers remove a live rooster — believed to help the spirit find its home and ward off evil — from her son’s coffin before it was taken up the street to the crackle of Chinese fireworks. The scene was played out in front of 100 or so villagers, as the smell of powder from the firecrackers filled the grim air of suffering that has descended on Longmen, a tiny rural community in southwestern Sichuan province.
The life of many in Longmen, and across the wider county of Lushan, changed forever when the devastating earthquake struck on Saturday morning, leaving more than 200 people dead or missing. But the loss of 15-year-old Wu Ji, a cherished child in a society that prizes sons far more than daughters, represented a traumatic body-blow for the family of farm workers.
In China, rural families are exempt from the country’s one-child policy as parents often rely on support from children in their later years, unlike urban residents, and much of that is provided by sons. But Wu Ji, who had a sister, was the only son in this close-knit family and his parents, although not old, consider him irreplaceable.
The wider family, which includes grandparents and the deceased boy’s uncle, say they have no hope for the future.
For now, the distraught father is thinking only of the tragic present.
“From today onwards I do not have a son,” Wu said, stroking his brow and looking towards the floor. “He had so many friends. He had such a humorous and gentle personality.”
As the funeral procession made its way up the kind of steep and narrow mountain street that gives quake-prone Sichuan its rugged character, nearby residents struggled to come to terms with the devastation.
An 88-year-old woman surnamed Zhu walked down the rubble-littered Chonglu Road with a 2-year-old infant on her back, discussing with neighbors their common ordeal.
“I will stay outside with this child until I am certain that there are no more earthquakes,” she said, breaking off from a conversation with a family making noodles on a makeshift stove on the curbside.
AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
Lushan, China
Thousands of rescue workers combed through flattened villages in southwest China on Sunday in a race to find survivors from a powerful quake as the toll of dead and missing rose past 200.
Dressed in bright orange uniforms, rescuers battled their way up mountain paths strewn with wreckage to reach isolated parts of Sichuan province on the edge of the Tibetan Plateau.
Army troops dressed in camouflage worked through the night, searching villages where houses had been destroyed for survivors and treating those injured in the quake.
China’s new Premier Li Keqiang has rushed to the disaster zone and was shown by state broadcaster CCTV eating breakfast in a tent. He told state media that “the rescue effort is our first duty.” Li said on Saturday that the first 24 hours was “the golden time for saving lives,” as China’s new leaders respond to a fresh disaster five years after another Sichuan earthquake left more than 90,000 people dead or missing.
But the rescue operation was hampered by huge queues of traffic—some stretching back for 20 kilometers—clogging roads into the disaster zone.
“We really want to go in and help people, but instead we are waiting in traffic,” one frustrated relief official said in his car, as large numbers of volunteer rescuers from local communities tried to head to the zone.
Boulders the size of cars littered streets in Lushan county, the epicenter of the earthquake. “Three people died in that building, and no one wants to live in this area any more because it is too dangerous,” a 45-year-old man surnamed Yang told Agence-France Presse (AFP), surrounded by rubble from the quake.
More than 1,100 aftershocks have followed since the quake struck Sichuan province on Saturday morning. Chinese seismologists registered the tremor at 7.0 magnitude while the US Geological Survey gave it as 6.6.
At least 179 people have been confirmed dead, 24 are missing and nearly 11,500 were injured, the Ministry of Civil Affairs said.
Firefighters helped by sniffer dogs have pulled 91 people alive from the rubble, the Xinhua news agency said, citing the Ministry of Public Security.
At Lushan People’s Hospital, a steady stream of ambulances continued to arrive in the early hours of Sunday. Most victims were taken to tents erected in the grounds of the hospital, where doctors treated the wounded.
A 68-year-old woman with a broken arm spoke of the terror she experienced when the earthquake struck.
“It was as if the mountain was alive,” she told AFP. “Now I have no home to go. So I don’t know what I am going to do.”
Quake-prone Japan, which has been mired in tension with China over a high-seas territorial dispute, offered any help that is required.
“Japan is ready to offer its maximum support,” Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said in a message to Chinese President Xi Jinping and Premier Li, according to Japan’s foreign ministry.
China responded that overseas assistance was not needed at the moment but that it would contact Japan if that changes, the ministry said.
More than 17,000 Chinese soldiers and police have joined the rescue mission and five drones were sent to capture aerial images, Xinhua said, as well as aircraft carrying out rescue and relief work. A military vehicle carrying 17 troops headed for the quake area plummeted over a cliff on Saturday, killing one soldier and injuring seven others.
Wu Yong sobs as fellow villagers carry away his teenage boy’s coffin, after a terrifying tremor in the mountains of southwest China robbed him of the only son he is likely ever to have.
“I saw my son but I couldn’t save him,” the 42-year-old said, recalling the moment he rushed from the living room to his boy’s bedroom to discover him buried under rubble.
“I called him and he answered two times... but I couldn’t save him,” Wu added, his house totally caved in, as friends tried to comfort him.
His 38-year-old wife Yue Yingcui collapsed in the street moments earlier, screaming in grief as neighbors and friends struggled to hold her in their arms.
She had just seen villagers remove a live rooster — believed to help the spirit find its home and ward off evil — from her son’s coffin before it was taken up the street to the crackle of Chinese fireworks. The scene was played out in front of 100 or so villagers, as the smell of powder from the firecrackers filled the grim air of suffering that has descended on Longmen, a tiny rural community in southwestern Sichuan province.
The life of many in Longmen, and across the wider county of Lushan, changed forever when the devastating earthquake struck on Saturday morning, leaving more than 200 people dead or missing. But the loss of 15-year-old Wu Ji, a cherished child in a society that prizes sons far more than daughters, represented a traumatic body-blow for the family of farm workers.
In China, rural families are exempt from the country’s one-child policy as parents often rely on support from children in their later years, unlike urban residents, and much of that is provided by sons. But Wu Ji, who had a sister, was the only son in this close-knit family and his parents, although not old, consider him irreplaceable.
The wider family, which includes grandparents and the deceased boy’s uncle, say they have no hope for the future.
For now, the distraught father is thinking only of the tragic present.
“From today onwards I do not have a son,” Wu said, stroking his brow and looking towards the floor. “He had so many friends. He had such a humorous and gentle personality.”
As the funeral procession made its way up the kind of steep and narrow mountain street that gives quake-prone Sichuan its rugged character, nearby residents struggled to come to terms with the devastation.
An 88-year-old woman surnamed Zhu walked down the rubble-littered Chonglu Road with a 2-year-old infant on her back, discussing with neighbors their common ordeal.
“I will stay outside with this child until I am certain that there are no more earthquakes,” she said, breaking off from a conversation with a family making noodles on a makeshift stove on the curbside.
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