Fears grow of huge death toll in China earthquake

Tens of thousands of people were feared dead tonight in a huge earthquake that shattered central China.

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

The official death toll from the region of small cities and towns was put at around 8,500 but with reports coming in of collapsed hospitals, schools, factories and office blocks it was expected to climb much higher.

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

In Juyuan town in Dujiangyan city, just south of the epicentre, the middle school collapsed, burying 900 pupils. 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 said news agency 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 quake “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.

The quake was one of the deadliest in three decades and posed a challenge to a government already grappling with discontent over high inflation and a widespread uprising among Tibetans in western China while trying to prepare for the Beijing Olympics this August.

Stock markets in Shanghai and Shenzhen seesawed, dropping on inflation worries and then rising and tapering off over worries about the quake’s economic impact.

Much of the affected area has been closed to foreign media, compounding the difficulties of getting information.

Although it was difficult to telephone Chengdu, an Israeli student, Ronen Medzini, sent a text message to The Associated Press saying there were power and water outages there.

The earthquake hit around 2.30 pm and lasted about three minutes.

It rattled buildings in Beijing 930 miles to the north, causing office towers to evacuate. People ran screaming into the streets in other cities, where many residents said they had never felt an earthquake.

Hundreds of thousands of foreign visitors are expected for the Olympics, which start there on August 8, but venues for the games were undamaged.

Li Jiulin, a top engineer on the 91,000-seat National Stadium, known as the Bird’s Nest and the jewel of the Olympics, was conducting an inspection at the venue when the quake occurred. He told reporters the building was designed to withstand a 8.0 quake.

“The Olympic venues were not affected by the earthquake,” said a spokesman for the Beijing organising committee. “We considered earthquakes when building those venues.”

A magnitude 7.8 earthquake is considered a major event, capable of causing widespread damage and injuries in populated areas.

The quake 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.

A 1933 quake near the area where Monday’s struck killed at least 9,000, according to geologists.