China steps up air-drops for quake-hit areas

China ordered 101 more helicopters into the air today and planned aid drops into remote areas of Sichuan province as it struggled to cope with the powerful earthquake that has directly affected 10 million people.

Plans for the Defence Ministry to deploy the helicopters underscored worries that a death toll of almost 15,000 will skyrocket unless help for the needy arrives soon.

Helicopters have already been used to ferry in troops and supplies to the isolated epicentre of Monday’s 7.9-magnitude quake, but rescuers have been forced to dig for survivors with their hands.

Near Shifang, where chemical plants collapsed in the earthquake, soldiers could be seen burying bodies in a mass grave. About 50 troops wearing helmets and face masks were using a large mechanical shovel to dig a grave. The bodies were wrapped in white sheets. Lime was also put into the grave.

The official Xinhua News Agency said three mountainous towns north of the provincial capital of Chengdu were still cut off. It said 20,000 residents were trapped in the towns of Qingping, Jinhua and Tianchi. The number of casualties was not known.

Xinhua said a team of 500 People’s Liberation Army soldiers carrying medicine and food were attempting to hike into the towns again.

Nearly 26,000 people remained buried in collapsed buildings. The quake also caused landslides that blocked roads to hardest-hit areas.

However, as the rescue effort gathered momentum, the depth of the effort needed to care for tens of thousands of people made homeless has stretched the government’s resources.

North of Chengdu in Deyang, the largest town near the devastated areas of Hanwang and Mianyang, thousands of people have streamed into the city hospital since Monday, mostly with head or bone injuries.

Patients heavily wrapped in bandages and with cuts and bruises were huddled in canvas tents in the hospital’s parking lot.

“Our doctors have worked continuously since Monday and people keep coming in. We have to keep strengthening our measures to keep up,” said Luo Mingxuan, the Communist Party secretary of the hospital.

There were piles of donated clothing for survivors at the hospital and stands for them to make free telephone calls. Handwritten notes with names of the injured were posted on a board in front of the hospital’s emergency section.

Ambulances arrived every few minutes.

Xinhua said the quake directly affected 10 million people in Sichuan – or about the population of Belgium.

The official death toll rose yesterday to 14,866, and in Sichuan province more than 27,000 people were buried or missing, provincial vice governor Li Chengyun said, according to Xinhua.

An already massive military operation gathered pace with more than 116,000 soldiers and police mobilised.

After two days of rain that prevented relief flights, People’s Liberation Army helicopters flew 90 sorties to the epicentre in Wenchuan county and other areas, carrying 33.3 tons of food, medicine and tents and ferry out 156 injured people, Xinhua reported.

The Chengdu Military Area Command planned to air-drop 50,000 packets of food, 5,000 cotton-padded quilts and clothes into the epicentre areas of Beichuan and Wenchuan counties.

The central government said it had allocated disaster spending of nearly £80m (€100m).

Public donations have totalled £64.5m (€80.9m) so far in both cash and goods.

Aerial TV footage showed rows of small buildings flattened in Yingxiu in Wenchuan county, where rescuers who hiked in said they found only 2,300 survivors in the town of about 10,000, with another 1,000 badly hurt, Xinhua reported.

It said today that aftershocks in Yingxiu had collapsed some of the remaining buildings and set off landslides. There was no word on further casualties.

Some 2,000 soldiers have also been sent to shore up a dam cracked by quake.

Four-inch cracks have scarred the top of the two-year-old Zipingpu Dam, the business news magazine Caijing said on its website in a report from the scene.

Although the government has pronounced it safe after an inspection, its waters are being emptied to relieve pressure, Caijing said.

The economic planning agency said nearly 400 dams, most of them small, were damaged by the quake. But the government says there was no damage to the massive Three Gorges dam, the world’s largest, which is about 350 miles east of the epicentre.