Quake Toll Rises; China Struggles to Reach Victims

Wang Jiaowen/ColorChina Photo for Associated Press
Rescuers removed an injured person from a collapsed building on Tuesday in southwestern China. More photos at nytimes.com.More Photos >
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ByEDWARD WONG and JAKE HOOKER
Published: May 14, 2008
YONG’AN, China — The battle for survival here is as stark as anywhere in theearthquake zone.
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Interactive Map Earthquake in Sichuan Province
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Times Topics: Sichuan Earthquake
Times Topics: Earthquakes
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Wang Jiaowen/ColorChina Photo, via Associated Press
The remains of collapsed buildings in Beichuan County, Sichuan Province, in southwestern China on Tuesday, a day after a powerful earthquake struck. At least 5,000 are dead in the county.More Photos »
On Tuesday morning, Wang Guofei and his younger brother drove to look for their mother in the rugged southwestern county of Beichuan, where at least 5,000 people have died as a result of the earthquake on Monday. But the road had been washed out by a landslide, and Mr. Wang said he would return the next day and search for his mother on foot.
“She has potatoes,” he said. “She can live for a while.”
In the aftermath of the earthquake, rescue workers across southwest China struggled to reach the tens of thousands of people who remained buried, as the death toll climbed above 13,000, according to provincial authorities. That toll is likely to rise still higher as workers break through to affected areas, making the earthquake China’s deadliest natural disaster in three decades. Hundreds of thousands are injured or homeless.
The authorities said that more than 18,000 people were still unaccounted for in Mianyang in Sichuan Province, and 2,300 were missing after the collapse of a school and two factories in the nearby town of Shifang.
More than 1,300 soldiers and medics spent the day clambering over landslides and the remnants of a mountain highway before breaking through to Wenchuan, a city of 100,000 and the epicenter of the quake. China Central Television reported that about 60,000 people were unaccounted for across Beichuan County; it quoted a soldier saying one town could account for only 2,300 of 9,000 people living there. Most victims were in the rugged center of Sichuan Province, although scores of deaths have been reported in five adjacent provinces.
The central government, which said it was spending $120 million on rescue efforts, has sent 50,000 soldiers to the disaster zone. “We welcome funds and supplies,” Wang Zhenyao, the Civil Affairs Ministry’s top disaster relief official, said, according to The Associated Press. “We can’t accommodate personnel at this point.”
President Bush called PresidentHu Jintao and offered an initial $500,000 in relief aid, saidDana Perino, the White House spokeswoman. Aid has begun arriving from other countries, with Russia sending a plane with 30 tons of relief supplies.
News of the quake has dominated Chinese television. The state-controlled media have been especially aggressive in their coverage, with reporters fanning out across the stricken region. Home video, cellphone images and commentary have been flowing uncensored onto Web sites.
In Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan, thousands of residents, rattled by more than 1,000 tremors, camped out in the streets. One aftershock on Tuesday afternoon registered a magnitude of 6.1; the earthquake registered 7.9. Most of the worst-hit areas remained without cellphone service.
The quake destroyed 80 percent of structures in some of the towns and small cities near its epicenter, Chinese officials said.
The town of Yong’an, the gateway to the mountains of Beichuan County, is the scene of one of the largest rescue efforts by the Chinese government, with convoy after convoy of military trucks, fire engines and ambulances rumbling up here.
Thousands of reserve troops have been bused into the area, but they do not have enough supplies, like food and tents, for the survivors, said Mr. Wang, the relief official. The farmers living in the mountains who survived the earthquake have had to rely on themselves rather than wait for outside help, he added.
The government has set up a tent city for the homeless across from the local Communist Party headquarters in Yong’an.
As night fell, Bai Zaohong and two teenage girls stood shivering in the cold.
“Do you have a car?” Ms. Bai pleaded with a visitor. “Can you take us off the mountain?”
They looked up at the granite peaks ringing a muddy field of more than 100 blue tents. Inside their tent, four people were huddled beneath blankets. The town is in a high basin surrounded by fold after fold of mountain ranges where villages had crumbled into steep river valleys and landslides had blocked roads after the earthquake.
Ms. Bai, a daughter and tent mates had walked down from their village on Tuesday afternoon after leaving behind Ms. Bai’s husband, who has a bad leg.
But they had arrived too late to catch a truck.
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Andrew Jacobs contributed reporting from Beijing.
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