Death toll nears 9,000 after Chinese earthquake

TENS of thousands of people were feared dead last night in a huge earthquake that shattered central China.

The official death toll from the region was put at about 8,700, but with reports coming in of collapsed hospitals, schools, factories and office blocks that number was expected to climb much higher.

Shockwaves from the 7.8-magnitude earthquake centred in the Sichuan province were felt as far away as Vietnam and Thailand.

The Chinese government admitted that the quake had caused deaths in three other provinces and the city of Chongqing.

In Juyuan town in Dujiangyan city, just south of the epicentre, the middle school collapsed, burying 900 children. No figures were given for the number who died.

Photos posted on the internet showed arms and a torso sticking out of the rubble of the school as dozens of people worked to free them, using small winches or their hands to move concrete slabs. The official state Xinhua news agency said 50 bodies had been pulled from the debris, but did not say if they were alive.

Another photo from Wenchuan, closest to the epicentre, showed what appeared to have been a six-storey building flattened, ripped away from taller buildings of grey concrete. Xinhua reported students were also buried under five other toppled schools in Deyang city.

Beijing mobilised more than 8,000 soldiers and police to help rescuers in Sichuan and put the province on the second-highest level of emergency footing.

Premier Wen Jiabao called the earthquake “a major geological disaster” and flew into the Sichuan capital of Chengdu, a city of 10 million people, to oversee the rescue and relief operations.

A magnitude of 7.8 is considered a significant event. The earthquake appeared to be the deadliest since the most devastating in modern history, which killed 240,000 people in the city of Tangshan, near Beijing, in 1976.