Three rescued from rubble five days after quake

RESCUERS pulled three people alive from the rubble yesterday, five days after an earthquake killed nearly 2,000 people in a Tibetan region of western China.

Aid convoys, meanwhile, clogged the main road into the remote mountainous area.

China Central Television said a four-year-old girl and a woman had been trapped since last Wednesday under a bed in a collapsed mud house in a village about 20 kilometres from the hardest- hit town of Jiegu, until rescuers dug them out yesterday.

Relatives kept Wujian Cuomao, 68, and Cairen Baji alive by sending them food and water through gaps in the rubble with the help of bamboo poles, state broadcaster CCTV said. The report showed a team of rescuers lifting the woman onto a stretcher, throwing a thick blanket over her and putting her in an ambulance. The child was seen wrapped in a blanket in the arms of a rescuer.

CCTV said the woman’s life was not in danger while the child suffered no injuries.

Also yesterday, rescuers freed a Tibetan woman named Ritu from her toppled house on a hillside, CCTV said. Half her body had been trapped by the debris, the report said, but her vital signs were stable.

The death toll from the quake in Qinghai province climbed to 1,944, the official Xinhua News Agency said yesterday. More than 12,100 people were hurt. At least 1,100 bodies were cremated or buried by Saturday, according to the provincial civil affairs department.

In Jiegu, thousands of Tibetan Buddhist monks picked at rubble with shovels, performing funeral rites and throwing food to survivors from the backs of trucks. Most of the work in town, however, has shifted from rescue to rebuilding, as search teams left yesterday.

Relief goods rumbled past mountainside hamlets where residents pitched government-provided tents along a two-lane highway.

Survivors streamed from their tents and chased the trucks, the women scooping bread rolls and packets of instant noodles into the aprons of their traditional robes.