China launches rescue effort after earth tremors

The Chinese government dispatched cold-weather tents, earthquake teams and cash today to a remote area of the country’s north-west where powerful twin tremors, minutes apart, killed nine people and razed houses.

The first quake in rural Gansu province, which hit at 8.41 pm local time last night (12.41pm Irish time) and measured magnitude 6.1.

It sent people scurrying into freezing temperatures. As some trickled back inside, the second quake – almost as powerful at magnitude 5.8 – hit seven minutes later.

“It was chaos. People were running out of their homes and into the night,” a resident of a township called Yonggu told AP.

Another six people were seriously hurt and 37 more suffered minor injuries, the official Xinhua News Agency reported from Lanzhou, the provincial capital.

More than 200 aftershocks were reported – several as strong as magnitude 4.0, the government said.

The hardest-hit areas were Minle, Sunan and Shandan counties near the city of Zhangye, roughly 850 miles west of the capital, Beijing.

Authorities said 143,000 people were affected, and government pictures from the scene showed stone houses collapsed into piles of rubble, residents in shelters and pigs wandering amid wreckage.

The three counties are located in an earthquake-prone region called the Qilian seismic zone, where a mountain range of the same name bumps up against flatlands.

Government seismologists say a rupture in that range may be making the area more seismically active.

An 8.5-magnitude quake on the edge of that zone in 1920 killed 200,000 people, according to Zhang Xiaodong of the State Seismological Bureau’s analysis and forecast centre.

In 1954, a 7.3-magnitude quake in the zone rumbled through Shandan County, killing 50 people.

Xinhua, quoting the provincial seismological bureau, said 30% of houses near the quakes’ epicentre were damaged severely and that 90% of buildings in Yaozhaizi, a small village in Yonggu Township, had collapsed.

The central government’s Civil Affairs Ministry said ”over 10,000 residential rooms collapsed” but didn’t specify what that meant.

It also said 3,000 head of livestock were either killed or hurt and that schools, grain warehouses and bridges were damaged.

Authorities also lowered water levels on two reservoirs in the area, saying they feared flooding after they spotted cracks on dams after the quakes.

The water release from the Shuangshusi and Zhaizhaizi reservoirs in Minle County began minutes after the quakes and continued through the night.

Nearly 200 million cubic feet of water had been released by Sunday morning, the central government said.

The region has experienced snow and below-freezing temperatures in recent days, lending urgency to relief efforts and the erecting of temporary shelters.

“Most people slept outside last night. They wanted to make sure their houses didn’t collapse on them,” said Lu Jinggui, a curtain-shop clerk in Minle County.