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China tremor kills scores

April 20, 2013

Scores were killed and thousands injured on Saturday when a 6.6 magnitude earthquake hit China’s southwestern Sichuan province. Rescuers were brought in immediately to help uncover survivors trapped in the rubble.

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Rescuers work to rescue a child from her collapsed home after an earthquake hit Ya'an City in Lushan county, southwest China's Sichuan province on Saturday. (Photo: STR/AFP/Getty Images)
Image: AFP/Getty Images

China’s worst earthquake in three years struck at 8:02 a.m. local time on Sunday in Lushan county near Ya’an city, killing 179 people and injuring at least 6,700.

President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang said the most important thing was to focus on rescuing survivors so as to limit the death toll. Six thousand troops were sent into the area to help the rescue work, according to Xinhua news agency.

“The current most urgent issue is grasping the first 24 hours since the quake’s occurrence, the golden time for saving lives,” Xinhua quoted Li as saying.

Erdbeben in China - Mehr als 100 Tote

Hunt for survivors

Most of the deaths were in Lushan, where residents are now without water and electricity. Rescuers did manage, however, to pull 32 survivors from the rubble there, Xinhua reported.

Li arrived in the quake zone by helicopter and helped organize rescue efforts from a plaza in Longmen township in Lushan, Xinhua reported. The square outside the Lushan County Hospital was turned into a triage center.

According to a state television report, nearly all the low-rise housing and buildings in villages near the epicenter collapsed in the earthquake.

Tremor-battered region

The same region was struck by a larger earthquake in 2008, which killed 70,000.

Tremors and aftershocks continued to affect the region, the largest of which registered a magnitude 5.1.

Ya’an city, one of the birthplaces of Chinese tea culture, is home to 1.5 million people, as well as one of China’s main centers for protecting the giant panda.

“There are still shakes and tremors and our area is safe. The pandas are safe,” a spokesman with Ya'an's Bifengxia nature park, a tourism park that houses more than 100 pandas, told Reuters news agency.

In addition to aftershocks, residents have been warned by the China Meteorological Association to be on the lookout for landslides in Lushan county over the weekend.

tm/slk (AP, AFP, dpa, Reuters)