An earthquake killed at least 120 people in a mountainous part of northwestern China, officials and state media said Tuesday, collapsing buildings while residents slept inside and sending people scrambling. in the cold night.
Rescuers are searching for survivors in rural Jishishan County in Gansu Province, the epicenter of the earthquake, officials from Gansu said at a press conference on Tuesday. They said the earthquake, which struck at 11:59 pm on Monday, killed 113 people in the province and injured more than 500 others.
Thirteen people in the city of Haidong in neighboring Qinghai Province were also killed, according to the state-run Xinhua News Agency.
The earthquake had a magnitude of 5.9, according to the United States Geological Survey, although it was measured at 6.2 by the China Earthquake Administration. Photos and videos shared by state media showed brick houses destroyed, and rooms buried in rubble. Hours later, rescuers were still digging people out, according to CCTV, the state broadcaster.
The quake damaged 15,000 homes and cut water, electricity and transport connections in parts of Gansu, which, like much of the country, is braving the cold. The temperature in Jishishan at the time of the earthquake was about -20 degrees Celsius, or about -4 degrees Fahrenheit, according to state media.
In interviews with state media outlets, residents recounted waking up and fleeing the cold with barely enough time to grab extra layers of clothing. The pictures showed people in a square wrapped in thick comforters.
On social media, people who said they were in the quake area reported that they started bonfires in their yards or burned cardboard boxes to stay warm. They described the shock of learning that neighbors or friends had died, and trying to assess the damage to their homes.
Some residents said Jimu News, a site affiliated with Hubei Province, said they expected to spend the night in their cars, driving away from the epicenter. In the provincial capital of Gansu, Lanzhou, 100 miles away, a college student told The Papera Shanghai party-affiliated outlet, that closets in his eighth-floor dorm room shook, and that students felt aftershocks as they fled downstairs from the first quake.
Some risked running back to the building later for extra clothing because of the cold, he said.
On Tuesday morning, rescue workers set up rows of tents in the main squares of earthquake-affected villages, according to CCTV. They rushed to deliver thousands of beds, blankets, mattresses and coats.
Villagers who livestreamed on social media Tuesday assured each other that they would rebuild together.
Gansu is one of China’s poorest provinces, and Jishishan County is mainly made up of small towns and villages, home to about 260,000 people, a local official said. said party-affiliated media. The local government does not have enough clothes, blankets or shoes and will have to rely on the provincial government, said official Li Yong.
In 2020, provincial officials formally declared that Jishishan was no longer “poverty-ridden,” as part of a nationwide campaign to supposedly eradicate rural poverty by the end of that year.
Since 1900, there have been three earthquakes of magnitude 6.0 or higher, as measured by China, within a 120-mile radius of Monday’s quake, state media said.
Some parts of Gansu lie within an earthquake-prone belt that runs from Mongolia in the north to Myanmar in the south, Xu Xiwei, a professor at the China University of Geosciences, state media said. Many houses in the area may not have been built strong enough to withstand earthquakes, and the fact that the earthquake struck in the middle of the night probably made it difficult for people to escape, adding to the casualties, Professor Xu said.
The State Council, China’s cabinet, and the National Health Commission have assigned teams to the site to oversee rescue operations, CCTV said. China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, said the disaster occurred in a “high area with cold weather” and ordered workers to repair the infrastructure as soon as possible.
At 9:46 a.m. Tuesday, China reported another earthquake, at magnitude 5.5, in the far western region of Xinjiang, about 1,800 miles west of Jishishan. Information about casualties was not immediately available.
Li You, Claire Fu and Siyi Zhao contributed research.
