Strong aftershock adds to China misery

Rubble yields 163 alive as rescuers reach secluded areas; death toll tops 22,000

DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE PRESS SERVICES

YINGXIU, China - A powerful aftershock knocked out roads and communications in some of the most quake-ravaged parts of central China on Friday as emergency crews rescued 163 people who had survived up to 100 hours trapped in the ruins.

At dawn today, rescuers were holding out hope of finding more survivors, and authorities werepreparing for the daunting task of housing and feeding millions left homeless.

With the official death toll at more than 22,000, an air force unit reached Yinchanggou, ascenic spot in the mountains north of the Sichuan provincial capital of Chengdu, finding that landslides had swept away rustic small hotels.

“There are several hundred hotels, including farmer homestays, probably 800 in all. They are all rubble now,” Cai Weisu, an official with an air force unit from the Chengdu Military Region, told Sichuan Television.Most of the dead are tourists, he said, but he did not identify whether they were foreign or Chinese.

Tens of thousands of people are considered buried or missing throughout the disaster zone. There were about 12 million people living within a 60-mile radius of the epicenter of Wenchuan, according to a studyon the potential impact of the quake by Xu Mingbao, a senior researcher at the University of Michigan’s China Data Center.

China’s President Hu Jintao flew to Beichuan to assess the damage on his first trip to the region since Monday’s disaster.

“Although the time for the best chance of rescue, the first 72 hours after an earthquake, has passed, saving lives remains the top priority of our work,” Hu said at a meeting with survivors, according to the official Xinhua News Agency. “Quake relief work has entered the most crucial phase. We must make every effort, race against time, all difficulties to achieve the final victory of the relief efforts.”

Government officials accustomed to tightly controlled media took the unusual step of fielding questions from people online about why thousands of schools that collapsed were not built to be quake-safe.

Damage from the magnitude-5.5 aftershock - one of dozens of strong tremors since the quake Monday - was a temporary setback to the relief operation. Repair crews were rapidly restoring mobile phone services and unblocking roads within four hours, state media reported.

Trucks navigated around boulders and splintered pavement that clogged roads into the forest-clad mountains of Beichuan County, about 100 miles north of Chengdu.

China Central Television reported today that rescue teams in the earthquake zone pulled 163 people alive from the rubble Friday.

Augmenting the 130,000 soldiers and police deployed, Xinhua said, specialized international teams had joined the effort- the first time ever that China has accepted outside professionals for help in a domestic disaster.

Today, teams from South Korea, Singapore and Russia joined a Japanese specialist group.

Meanwhile, a U.S. Air Force cargo plane loaded with tents, lanterns and 15,000 meals left Hawaii today for China. It is the first aid flight from the United States to help in Sichuan province. Another Air Force delivery was to go to China from Alaska.

China hasn’t accepted American relief workers, said Wang Baodong, spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington.

In one hard-hit area, Chinese soldiers slogged up a slippery mud path Friday into the village of Yingxiu, as some of their comrades stayed back and used rubble from landslides to patch the road so supply and rescue vehicles could get closer.

Most buildings in the village collapsed in the quake and the rest appear to be damaged beyond repair. Hundreds of residents huddled in tents. Small groups of soldiers, some lugging body bags, rushed from place to place checking reports of people trapped. They pulled out bodies and - at least twice - survivors. Others dug a burial pit and laid in at least 80 bodies.

Helicopters whirred overhead, ferrying supplies anddropping leaflets with survival instructions that included not drinking dirty water and staying away from collapsed buildings. “We should trust the party and the government,” the leaflets also said.

With temperatures rising and 14,000 bodies still estimated by officials to be buried at building sites across Sichuan province, the government’s Health Ministry instructed workers to find, clean and dispose of the bodies as quickly as possible.

The government said it would investigate why so many school buildings collapsed in the quake and severely punish anyone responsible for shoddy construction.

“If quality problems do exist in the school buildings, we will deal with the persons responsible strictly with no toleration,” Ha Jin, an official with the Ministry of Education, told the state-run press.

Officials in at least six provinces promised to tear down dangerous school buildings to protect students, state media reported. The quake destroyed about 6,900classrooms, not including those in the hardest-hit counties.

China’s education system is chronically underfunded. Building experts said the problem here, as in many other parts of the world, was a lack of commitment by governments to improve the quality of school buildings.

“Schools should never collapse, and hospitals and fire stations should never collapse. These are all civic structures that are needed in a disaster,” said Roger Bilham, a professor of geological sciences at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “So when I hear a school has collapsed, I point the finger at politics.”

More than 4 million apartments and houses were damaged or destroyed in Sichuan, Housing Minister Jiang Weixin told reporters.

Worried relatives went to sites where missing loved ones might be.

In the city of Hanwang, Zhou Furen walked for hours in borrowed shoes to a factory where her son had worked.

“I’ve been coming here every day, sitting here in the early morning, waiting,” she wept. “He’s been missing for more than three days now. But for my son I would come every day.”

The Chinese government said it had allocated $772 million for earthquake relief, according to the central bank’s Web site, nearly five times the amount two days earlier.

China has also received $457 million in donated money and goods for rescue efforts, according to the Ministry of Civil Affairs.

AIR Worldwide - a catastrophe risk modeling firm - estimated that losses to both insured and uninsured property would likely exceed $20 billion.

Information for this article was contributed by Ng Han Guan, Audra Ang, Tini Tran and Cara Anna of The Associated Press; Jill Drew and Liu Liu of The Washington Post; Eugene Tang, William Bi, Aaron Sheldrick, Josephine Lau, Li Yanping, Dune Lawrence, Kevin Hamlin, Wing-Gar Cheng, Lee Spears, John Liu, Irene Shen, Luo Jun, Catherine Yang and Wendy Leung of Bloomberg News; and David Barboza of The New York Times.

Front Section, Pages 1, 6 on 05/17/2008