CHENGDU,
China — A powerful earthquake
struck southwestern China on Monday, toppling thousands of homes, factories and
offices, trapping students in schools, and killing at least 10,000 people, the
country’s worst natural disaster in three decades.
The
quake, which was estimated preliminarily to have had a magnitude of 7.9,
ravaged a mountainous region outside Chengdu, capital of Sichuan Province, just
after lunchtime Monday, destroying 80 percent of structures in some of the
towns and small cities near its epicenter, Chinese officials said. Its tremors
were felt as far away as Vietnam and set off another, smaller quake in the
outskirts of Beijing, 900 miles away.
Landslides,
power failures and fallen mobile phone towers left much of the affected area
cut off from the outside world and limited information about the damage. But
snapshots of concentrated devastation suggested that the death toll that could
rise significantly as rescue workers reached the most heavily damaged towns.
State media reported at midday on Tuesday that 10,000 people remained buried in
Mianzhu, one of the cities near the epicenter in Wenchuan.
At
least two large schools, each with nearly 1,000 students, were reduced to piles
of concrete dust and debris, setting off a frantic search for survivors that
stretched through the night.
Two
chemical factories in Shifang were destroyed, spilling 80 tons of toxic liquid
ammonia, forcing 6,000 people to evacuate their homes. The destruction of a
steam turbine factory in the city of Mianzhu killed at least 60 workers and
left 500 others missing, officials said on Tuesday.
The
quake is China’s biggest natural disaster since another earthquake leveled the
city of Tangshan in eastern China in 1976, leaving 240,000 people dead and
posing a severe challenge to the governing Communist Party, which initially
tried to cover up the catastrophe.
This
time, officials quickly mobilized 50,000 soldiers to help with rescue efforts,
state media said. Prime Minister Wen Jiabao
flew to the scene and was shown coordinating disaster response teams from the
cabin of his jet.
The
prime minister later stood outside the damaged edifice of the Traditional
Medicine Hospital in the city of Dujiangyan, shouting encouragement at people
trapped in its ruins.
“Hang
on a bit longer,” he said in televised remarks. “The troops are rescuing you.
As long as there is the slightest hope, we will never relax our efforts.”
The
quake was the latest in a series of events that have disrupted China’s planning
for the Olympic Games in August, including widespread unrest among the
country’s ethnic Tibetan population, which lives in large numbers in the same
part of Sichuan Province where the earthquake struck.
China’s
leaders often respond assertively to natural disasters, fearing a strong
popular reaction if they bungle rescue efforts. But a complex relief operation
on the scale that may be needed in Sichuan could strain Chinese resources even
as the United
Nations and many charitable groups are busy providing aid to
Myanmar, hit by a huge cyclone
this month.
Local
leaders may also face intense scrutiny of their compliance with building codes.
Since the Tangshan earthquake, China has required that new structures withstand
major quakes. But the collapse of schools, hospitals and factories in several
different areas around Sichuan may raise questions about how rigorously such
codes have been enforced during China’s epic building boom.
The
powerful initial quake struck at 2:28 p.m. local time, or 2:28 a.m. Eastern
time, near Wenchuan County, according to China’s State Seismological Bureau.
Most of the heavy damage appeared to be concentrated in nearby towns, which by
Chinese standards are not heavily populated. Chengdu, the largest city in the
area, with a population of about 10 million, is about 60 miles away and did not
appear to have suffered major damage or heavy casualties.
But
officials had yet to describe the impact in Wenchuan itself, which has a
population of 112,000 and is home to the Wolong Nature Reserve, the largest
panda reserve in China. The county of Beichuan, on the way from Chengdu to
Wenchuan, suffered several thousand deaths, state media said.
According
to Chinese television, 100 police officers were clambering across the region’s
only road, which was blocked by massive rock slides, to open a passageway to
Wenchuan, but had yet to reach it on Tuesday morning.
China’s
massive Three Gorges Dam, a few hundred miles east of the earthquake’s
epicenter, reported no immediate problems.
At
dawn on Tuesday morning in Chengdu, clusters of people were huddled outside,
many saying they were too fearful of aftershocks to go indoors. Many wore
plastic slickers to protect them from a steady drizzle.
Wang
Zihong, 35, a businessman from Gansu Province, had spent 12 hours outside his
hotel, squatting with others on a street corner.
“It
was a terrible shock,” he said. “I couldn’t stand up straight. We were on the
second floor and we ran outside.”
Chengdu’s
Huaxi Hospital, one of the largest in western China, started receiving patients
from surrounding counties on Monday afternoon. By Tuesday 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. He added, “The first patients who came had jumped
from buildings because they were frightened.”
After
the tremors shook Chengdu, roughly 4,000 frightened patients were relocated
from wards on the hospital’s upper floors to a courtyard outdoors. By Tuesday
morning, the patients were sitting in the rain, covered in plastic.
A
woman, Tang Hong, 50, sat beside her injured husband, Yan Chaozhong, in the
hospital. They had arrived early in the morning from Dujiangyan County, one
place that had suffered heavy damage. They had been inside their fourth-floor
apartment when the quake hit. “It was violent,” she said. “Even when we
crouched down, it flattened us.”
Ms.
Tang said she and her husband had tried to escape down a stairwell, but a
second tremor knocked her husband down the stairs, and he broke three ribs. She
said four six-story buildings on her street had been flattened. She wept as she
described how a school for handicapped and deaf students collapsed while the
children were in class. “It was horrible,” she said. “The entire school
building collapsed.”
Minutes
after the western temblor struck, a second, smaller quake struck Tongzhou, an
outer district of Beijing. Thousands of office workers were evacuated in the
capital city, but no damage was reported there.
“I
suddenly felt very dizzy, as if I were heavily drunk,” said Zeng Hui, who works
on the 22nd floor of an office tower in Beijing. “I thought I was seriously
ill, then I looked around and saw my colleagues felt the same way. We were
stunned.”
There
were reports of fatalities in Chongqing Municipality, near Sichuan, where two
primary schools were damaged. Four students died and more than 100 others were
injured, state media reported.
Xinhua,
the state-run news agency, devoted extensive coverage to the disaster,
publishing regular updates on the situation, including latest death tolls, on
its Chinese and English Web sites.
The
relatively vigorous flow of information and the fast response from top
officials and rescue workers stood in stark contrast to the way China handled
the Tangshan earthquake, or the way the military junta that rules neighboring
Myanmar has managed the aftermath of a giant cyclone that killed nearly 32,000
people there this month, according to Burmese government estimates.
Efforts
to reach people near the epicenter of the bigger quake in western China were
hindered by damage to the telephone system. Some 2,300 towers used to transmit
mobile phone signals had fallen, the country’s main mobile phone company
reported. The earthquake also disrupted air traffic control in western China, interfering
with flights between Asia and Europe on Monday afternoon, although flight
services were restored by the evening.
Cathay
Pacific Airways announced that it had canceled two flights between Hong Kong
and London — one in each direction — and had delayed the departure of a Monday
afternoon flight from Hong Kong to London by 19 hours, to Tuesday morning.
While
China Mobile acknowledged extensive damage to its cellphone towers, it is less
clear how much damage occurred to the separate communications network that
China’s authorities maintain for natural disasters and other contingencies.
Communications
equipment vendors attending a police equipment exhibition in Beijing last month
said China maintained a separate network using different frequencies and other
equipment from the main cellphone network. The separate network allows the
police and other agencies to respond to emergencies even when the main landline
and cellphone networks are overwhelmed with calls by residents.
Many
Western countries also maintain separate communications systems for
emergencies. China is still upgrading its emergency network by buying equipment
from Motorola and other foreign companies, communications industry officials
said at the exhibition.
Temporary
disruption of the air traffic control system in western China strongly
suggested that the authorities’ communications gear might also have been
damaged at least temporarily. China has worked closely with the Federal
Aviation Administration in the United States to improve air safety, and air
traffic control operations in the United States have backup communications
systems to avoid disruptions.