China earthquake kills hundreds in Qinghai

Advertisement

Chinese TV has been showing the damage to buildings

At least 300 people have died and others are trapped under rubble after a magnitude-6.9 earthquake struck China's Qinghai province, officials say.

The powerful tremor hit remote Yushu county, 500km (310 miles) south-west of provincial capital Xining, at 0749 (2349 GMT), at a shallow depth of 10km.

Chinese TV showed wrecked buildings and people scrabbling through debris.

Officials ordered rescue crews and supplies to Yushu, but the area is hundreds of miles from an airport.

"Soldiers have been dispatched to save the people buried in the collapsed houses," local official Huang Limin was quoted as saying by China's state news agency Xinhua.

A Yushu resident told Reuters news agency rescuers were trying to pull survivors from buildings.

"A lot of one-storey houses have collapsed. Taller buildings have held up, but there are big cracks in them," he said.

One official told journalists more than 85% of buildings near the epicentre had collapsed.

The official added that "a lot of students" had been buried after part of a vocational school collapsed.

Many of the buildings in Yushu were though to be made from wood.

In 2008, a huge quake struck neighbouring Sichuan province, which left 87,000 people dead or missing.

Quake-prone region

Karsum Nyima, the Yushu county television station's deputy head of news, told China's state-run CCTV that school students had been assembled in outside playgrounds, although school buildings had not collapsed.

ANALYSIS Michael Bristow, BBC News, Beijing The earthquake struck just before 0800 local time - when many people were still at home. It was followed by three aftershocks. Some media reports say most buildings in the town near the epicentre fell down. Grainy pictures on Chinese television showed rescuers pulling at the rubble of one collapsed structure. Soldiers have been sent to the area to help with the rescue. The earthquake happened in a remote and sparsely populated area on the Tibetan plateau. The area is regularly hit by earthquakes.

"In a flash, the houses went down. It was a terrible earthquake. In a small park, there is a Buddhist tower and the top of the tower fell off," he said.

"Everybody is out on the streets, standing in front of their houses, trying to find their family members."

Zhuo De, an ethnic Tibetan resident of Yushu, who spoke by phone from the capital of Qinghai province, Xining, said there could be many more casualties.

"The homes are built with thick walls and are strong, but if they collapsed they could hurt many people inside," he said.

The remote high-altitude region is prone to earthquakes, but officials from the US Geological Survey said this was the strongest quake the area had seen since 1976.

The region, which is home to ethnic Mongolians and Tibetan farmers and herdsmen, is dotted with coal, tin, lead and copper mines.

After the Sichuan quake, five million people were left homeless, and officials estimated rebuilding work would take at least three years.

The government later punished people who had compiled lists of the victims and had suggested shoddy school-building was partly to blame for the high death toll.

---

Are you in the area? Have you been affected by the quake, or have you seen or heard anything? Send your comments using the form below.

You can also send your pictures to [e-mail], text them to [phone], or if you have a large file you can upload it here.

Read the terms and conditions

At no time should you endanger yourself or others, take any unnecessary risks or infringe any laws.

A selection of your comments may be published, displaying your name and location unless you state otherwise in the box below.

Name

Your e-mail address

Town & Country

Phone number

Comments

The BBC may edit your comments and not all emails will be published. Your comments may be published on any BBC media worldwide.

Terms & Conditions