China quake toll could pass 10,000

Officials feared the death toll from Monday's powerful earthquake in Central China could climb beyond 10,000 people, as widespread damage was reported from the country's worst quake in three decades.

Many of the dead were reported to be children.

The 7.9-magnitude temblor that shook buildings as far away as Bangkok, Thailand, collapsed a three-story high school in the town of Juyuan, trapping up to 900 students under slabs of concrete and steel. Xinhua news agency said at least eight schools had collapsed.

Xinhua said 8,533 people were killed in Sichuan province alone.

The earthquake hit at 2:28 p.m. local time and was centered 55 miles northwest of Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, according to China's State Seismological Bureau.

More than 1,000 aftershocks jolted the region, state media reported, and the earthquake was felt nearly 1,000 miles away in Beijing, where workers poured into the streets as office towers swayed.

An estimated 50,000 soldiers, police and reservists were dispatched to the area to provide aid. The deployment of the military, in particular, sent a signal of urgency in a country that carefully calibrates the use of its armed forces.

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao arrived in Chengdu a few hours after the quake hit to oversee rescue efforts and establish a temporary headquarters for disaster relief.

Chinese President Hu Jintao called for "all-out" efforts to rescue quake victims.

Li Jing, general engineer of China's National Disaster Reduction Center, said the full scale of the devastation is unclear because communication and transportation links to mountainous Sichuan province were badly damaged. Cellphone communication in the area failed after 2,300 base stations and five power plants shut down, officials said. Chengdu airport closed and flights throughout the country were disrupted.

A major railway line to the northeast was ruptured, stranding about 10,000 passengers, Xinhua said. Although most of the power had been restored by nightfall, phone and Internet service was spotty and some neighborhoods remained without power and water.

Two chemical plants in Shifang city were reportedly flattened, burying hundreds of workers and spilling 80 tons of toxic liquid ammonia.

In Beijing, Olympic organizers said none of the venues built for the games, which open Aug. 8, were damaged. Li Jiulin, a top engineer on the 91,000-seat National Stadium, known as the Bird's Nest, was conducting an inspection at the venue when the quake occurred. He told reporters the building was designed to withstand an 8.0-magnitude quake, according to Reuters.

Zhang Guomin, a researcher at China's Seismological Bureau, said the damage was so great because the quake was shallow, about six miles below the earth's surface. Earthquakes less than 19 miles below the ground release 85 percent of their energy to the surface, Zhang said in an interview with the New China News Agency.

Chen Liangcai, in Sichuan's Deyang city, said the quake felt like "sitting on a train going through a hard turn." Chen said local officials advised residents not to go inside their homes to sleep, but to spend the night outside.

Experts said many buildings were not built to withstand the impact of such a severe earthquake.

Tang Yi, an office clerk in Chengdu, said local government vehicles were patrolling the streets broadcasting from loudspeakers that residents should not panic.

Tang said most of the people in his neighborhood were spending the night camped out in a local square. He saw some buildings with large cracks and others whose ceramic tiles had fallen off.

At least several hundred children were killed, perhaps as many as 900, in the high school in Juyuan, south of the epicenter, Xinhua said.

The news agency reported today that another 1,000 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 two yards high, it said.

Buried teenagers struggled to break free from the rubble, "while others were crying out for help," the news agency said. Families waited in the rain near the wreckage as rescuers wrote the names of the dead on a blackboard.

Premier Wen, a geologist by training, called the quake "a major geological disaster," and traveled to the disaster area to oversee rescue and relief operations.

"As long as there was a slightest hope, we should make our effort a hundred times and we will never relax," he said outside the collapsed school in Juyuan.

Parents of the dead students built makeshift religious altars at the site, resting the corpse on any available piece of plywood or cardboard, and burning paper money and incense in a traditional honor for their child in the afterlife, according to National Public Radio's Melissa Block.

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.

Monday's quake occurred on a fault where South Asia pushes against the Eurasian land mass, smashing the Sichuan plain into mountains leading to the Tibetan highlands — near communities that held sometimes violent protests of Chinese rule in mid-March.

There are already large numbers of troops from the Peoples' Armed Police, a paramilitary force, deployed in the area as a result of the protests in March.

Much of the area has been closed to foreign media and travelers since then, compounding the difficulties of getting information.

On Monday, China instituted tight controls on information, setting up checkpoints to bar Chinese and foreign correspondents from severely affected areas.

But snapshots of concentrated devastation suggested that the death toll could rise markedly as rescuers reach the most heavily damaged areas.

Chengdu's Huaxi Hospital, one of the largest in Western China, started receiving patients from surrounding counties on Monday afternoon. By this morning, 180 patients had arrived from hard-hit surrounding counties.

"Seven thousand people have died in Beichuan, a single county, and we think Wenchuan will be similar, too, because it was the epicenter," said Kang Zhilin, a spokesman for the hospital.

Compiled from The Associated Press, The Washington Post,

Los Angeles Times and

New York Times reports.