A powerful earthquake jolted China‘s Sichuan province Saturday near where a devastating quake struck five years ago, leaving at least 56 dead and more than 600 injured and prompting state media to warn of higher casualties.
The quake — measured by China‘s seismological bureau at magnitude-7 and the U.S. Geological Survey at 6.6 — struck the steep hills of Lushan county shortly after 8 a.m. toppling buildings, many of them older brick structures. Tiles fell from roofs and walls collapsed, sending people into the streets in their underwear and wrapped in blankets.
Rescue workers turned a square outside the Lushan’s county hospital into a triage center with medical personnel treating the wounded, according to footage on China Central Television.
Hard-hit parts of the county remained unreachable by road, with phone services cut off, but with some text and Internet services continuing, state media said.
A person whose posts to a micro-blogging account “Qingyi Riverside” on Sina Corp.’s Twitter-like Weibo service carried a Lushan geotag said that many buildings collapsed and that people could spot helicopters hovering above.
Aerial photos released by China‘s military and shown on state television showed individual houses in ruins and some stretches of the county seat and villages flattened into rubble. The roofs of some taller buildings appeared to have slipped off exposing the floors beneath them.
The official Xinhua News Agency reported that 56 people died. Xu Mengjia, Communist Party secretary for Ya’an, which administers Lushan, told CCTV that more than 600 people were injured.
The quake’s shallow depth, less than 13 kilometers (8 miles), likely magnified the impact and CCTV showed footage from local security cameras shaking. Xinhua said that the quake rattled buildings in the provincial capital of Chengdu 115 kilometers (70 miles), to the east. It caused the shutdown of the city’s airport for about an hour before reopening, state media said.
Lushan, where the quake struck, is home to 1.5 million people where the fertile Sichuan plain meets foothills that eventually rise to the Tibetan plateau. The area is near a well-known preserve for pandas, Bifengxia, which Xinhua said was not affected by the quake. Dozens of pandas were moved to Bifengxia from another preserve, Wolong, after its habitat was wrecked by the 2008 quake.
Xinhua reported that more than 2,000
From: http://feeds.foxnews.com/~r/foxnews/world/~3/NkxN7jbxj1k/
