MW 7.9 SW China 69,159 confirmed dead; 17,469 still missing

[Chacor]

CNN International ticker was reporting an all-clear earlier.

[JonathanBelles]

Finally a good story...and a higher death toll

Girl pulled from quake rubble after 50 hours

* Story Highlights
* Rescuers pull schoolgirl from debris as she calls for her uncle
* Devastated Mianyang city is becoming a camp fro displaced Chinese
* Official death toll from 7.9 magnitude quake is 14,866
* Premier Wen Jiabao: We will save all those who can be saved

(CNN) -- A frightened schoolgirl was pulled safely from the rubble of a school dormitory Wednesday evening -- 50 hours after she was buried by Monday's earthquake, state-run media said.

In a weak voice, the trapped girl called out to one of the rescuers, "uncle, save me, save me," the uncle said. "If anything (bad) had happened to her, the voice could haunt me for the rest of my life."

The official death toll from the quake had reached 14,866 by Wednesday evening, but casualty figures from various cities indicated a higher number of dead.

The state-run Xinhua news agency has provided death tolls for eight communities in Sichuan province that add up to nearly 20,000, including roughly 7,700 who perished in the town of Yingxiu, near the earthquake's epicenter. CNN cannot independently confirm the tallies.

According to the official figures, more than 30,000 people are missing, more than 25,000 are buried in rubble and about 65,000 were injured in Monday's 7.9 magnitude quake centered on Wenchuan county in Sichuan province.

The girl rescued at Muyu Middle School in Qingchuan County, Sichuan province, was among 89 children pulled from the rubble alive. At least 201 students were killed when the building collapsed while many were napping, according to China.org.

Rescuers were searching for an unspecified number still believed to be trapped.

Wang Guangfen, a nurse, climbed under a cement slab to give medicine to the girl, He Cuiqing, while other rescuers carefully shifted slabs until they could remove the girl.

"She appeared very fragile, and there were blood stains on her chest," China.org, quoted Wang saying. "But she was still conscious, and called me aunt when I reached her.
One of the Chinese cities slammed by the devastating earthquake that has killed tens of thousands is becoming a refugee camp for survivors.

Thousand of people uprooted by the quake have headed for Mianyang where the city's main sports gym and other facilities have been converted into rescue centers.

Men, women and children -- numbed and overwhelmed by the sudden tragedy -- sit huddled in the huge stadium as truckloads of aid and private donations, such as water, food and clothes, roll in.

Chinese companies, such as TV set-maker Changhong, located in Mianyang, are helping the refugees, Xinhua reports. Some companies are ordering their staffers to cook for the homeless and have provided supplies, such as batteries and flashlights.

Both the displaced and aid convoys have had to fend with closed-off roads, damaged by the quake and engulfed by landslides. Many downtown residents are sleeping outdoors under tents.

Reports say 7,395 people have been killed and 18,645 are reported trapped in debris in the city. Among those trapped were about 1,000 students in the rubble of a middle school.

Xinhua said 20,000 people are living in several rescue and aid centers, and more than 1,000 volunteers are helping them.

It reported that "upward of 20,000 people, including soldiers, armed police, and paramilitary personnel, are carrying out relief operations in the quake-stricken areas of Mianyang." Xinhua said 17 medical teams and 3,000 volunteers are helping.

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, who is leading rescue and recovery operations, visited the city Wednesday while touring a number of badly hit areas.

During another visit, to a school in Shifang where more than 100 children were trapped beneath rubble, Wen promised that saving lives was a top priority.

"We will put our best efforts forward to save all those alive who can be saved," he said. "This disaster has all tested us. We all have to band together and have confidence and push forward."

More than 30,000 people are "missing or out of reach" in Shifang, where local government officials told Xinhua the city's death toll exceeded 2,500.
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An ammonia leak from a collapsed chemical plant in the city was plugged Wednesday, Xinhua reported.

The agency also reported that a dam near the epicenter of the earthquake was safe and stable after earlier reports that it was damaged and that a breach could swamp Dujiangyan City downriver.

[wyq614]

Financial and blood donation has started in our school, my mum don't allow me to join blood donation, saying I'm too thin and weak, instead, she encourages me to give away some money.

My mates cried when watching the television live and so did the premier Wen. Seeing the miserable seen in Sichuan, he can't help crying. Wen's major in university was geology and he surely knows what it is all about there.

ps: I had hoped to exchange concerns about the earthquake that happened in my fatherland but I was unable to come here yesterday because of the old problem.(viewtopic.php?f=7&t=100888, proxy is good but slow, and sometimes I cannot post anything here with a proxy.). So if you can, please help me to solve this problem. I like storm2k and I don't want to get away from it.

[RL3AO]

From 0z Wed to 0z Thur, there were 10 earthquakes in Sichuan Province. All were 4.6-5.3.

[HurricaneBill]

A bit of good news:

U.S. tourists visiting panda reserve safe

Reports say that the pandas at two other reserves in the area are safe as well.

[Chacor]

More than 50,000 people may have died in the earthquake that devastated parts of China on Monday, state media say.

The warning came after the government confirmed the death toll had risen to 19,500, as rescue efforts continue to search for thousands still trapped.

About 10 million people across Sichuan province have been directly affected by the 7.9 quake, the media said.

China is mobilising 30,000 extra troops to Sichuan to help the 50,000 already involved in rescue efforts.

Beijing says it will accept foreign aid and has agreed to help from rescue teams from Japan and its rival Taiwan.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7402460.stm

[wyq614]

The whole Beichuan County, Sichuan Province, is ruined, with its magistrate seriously wounded, and its CPC secretary wounded, too.

The six vice-magistrate are feared dead, with now the time three of them confirmed dead and the other three missing.

Aditionally, at 22 hours Beijing Time, 16 May 2008, all the dormitories of Chinese universities will have their lights turned off in memorial of those victims of the earthquake.

[RL3AO]

50,000? What an amazing and sickening two weeks.

[HurricaneBill]

Three girls saved at China quake site after 86 hours

[Meso]

China's Sichuan province is hit by a new earthquake, triggering landslides and cutting roads and communications as rescue efforts continued in earnest four days after a massive quake killed up to 50,000 people. Even as hopes faded for survivors, a few people were still being pulled alive from the rubble.

http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiap ... index.html

[GCANE]

China tallies losses, costs from major earthquake
Friday May 16, 5:25 am ET
By Elaine Kurtenbach, AP Business Writer
China tallies losses, costs from earthquake as authorities strive to minimize disruptions


SHANGHAI, China (AP) -- Cracked dams and buckled roads, collapsed buildings and toppled factories -- China has begun tallying losses from the calamitous earthquake that struck earlier this week, with estimates ranging to over $20 billion.

With the death toll from the disaster forecast to rise as high as 50,000, China's main focus Friday remained on rescue and relief for survivors of the 7.9 magnitude quake that hit Sichuan province on Monday.

Central and local authorities have allocated 5.4 billion yuan ($772 million) for disaster relief, the central bank said, as millions more poured in public and corporate donations.

Given the extended destruction of roads, schools, homes, businesses and other infrastructure, AIR Worldwide, a catastrophe risk modeling firm, said it estimated that losses to both insured and uninsured property would likely exceed $20 billion.

Insurance companies had paid out 1.7 million yuan ($245,000) as of Thursday, the China Insurance Regulatory Commission said in a statement on its Web site.

AIR Worldwide put insured losses at up to $1 billion.

Although the death toll had risen to 19,509 by late Thursday, with some communities virtually flattened, the quake struck a relatively poor area where few families would hold life or household insurance.

Still, in Wenchuan county, location of the quake's epicenter, China Life Insurance Co., the country's biggest life insurer, had over 110,000 life insurance policies, according to a report by Fitch Ratings.

"In addition to commercial property and business interruption claims, payouts on life insurance policies are also expected to be sizable," Fitch said.

The Shanghai-based newspaper Oriental Morning Post cited one estimate putting maximum potential insurance payouts at 3 billion yuan ($430 million).

Specific reports of damage and losses were emerging gradually.

Zinc and fertilizer producer Sichuan Hongda Co. said Friday its businesses were "severely hit" by Monday's earthquake, with 31 employees dead.

Dongfang Electric Corp., a major manufacturer of power equipment, reported serious damage and casualties at a steam turbine factory, although other facilities were little affected.

The company's Hong Kong traded shares fell 11.3 percent Friday to 26.60 Hong Kong dollars after trading in its shares resumed for the first time since Tuesday. Trading in its Shanghai-listed shares was suspended pending a board meeting, Dongfang said.

The impact of the disaster on share prices overall has been limited. China's mainland bourses temporarily suspended trading in shares of companies based in the quake zone, and traders in Shanghai said the country's securities regulator had sought to discourage heavy selling related to the disaster through informal means.

Chinese share prices edged lower Friday on the selling of regional power, cement and steel companies. Investors were cashing in on midweek gains from speculation that such companies would benefit from rising demand due to post-quake reconstruction.

The benchmark Shanghai Composite Index slipped 0.4 percent to 3,624.23. The Shenzhen Composite Index fell 0.8 percent to 1.124.29.

China's economic planning agency, already struggling to keep inflation in check, has imposed temporary price caps on basic goods and transport in quake-hit areas, warning that price gouging would be punished.

The National Development and Reform Commission said Thursday that it would restrict prices for food, drinking water and transport in central Sichuan and Gansu provinces due to rising prices there.

Authorities were arranging special shipments of fuel, grain and edible oil to help prevent shortages.

[RL3AO]

So many aftershocks with this quake.

[HURAKAN]

British daily says China's earthquake rescue efficiency "impressive"

LONDON, May 16 (Xinhua) -- China's efficiency with which the leaders have responded to the massive earthquake destruction in Sichuan Province in southwest China has been "impressive," the leading local daily newspaper The Daily Telegraph said in a commentary Friday.

The 50,000 troops dispatched to Wenchuan, the epicenter of a 7.8-magnitude earthquake, have made an immediate impact in helping to rescue trapped survivors and distributing vital food and medical supplies, the daily said.

"The operation has been well-managed, with airports closed to civilian traffic so as not to impede relief flights," it said.

"Television bulletins broadcast appeals for blood donations, and priority has been given to restoring electricity and clearing roads," it said.

"The Chinese have demonstrated their proficiency at crisis management," and China is being showered with praise for its compassionate and well-disciplined response to the catastrophe in Sichuan, the daily said.

[RL3AO]

^

Almost sounds like a shot at Myanmar.

[Chacor]

No, that's just the state-run Xinhua talking up the positive coverage China is getting in British press for once.

[Chacor]

There has been panic in the quake-hit Chinese city of Beichuan after a river nearby burst its bank sparking reports it could flood the entire city.

The BBC's Paul Danahar in Beichuan says there was a stampede as thousands of people fled to higher ground.

The whole city has been evacuated, forcing the suspension of all rescue efforts, our correspondent says.

[HURAKAN]

28,881 confirmed dead in China earthquake

THE confirmed earthquake death toll in China has risen to 28,881, a central government official said today.

Another 198,347 people have been injured as of 2pm local time, Guo Weimin, a spokesman for China's State Council told a news conference.

Government officials have previously estimated that the death toll from Monday's 7.9-magnitude earthquake is above 50,000.

The upgrade in the toll came as officials in one major city near the epicentre, Deyang, sharply raised their estimate on how many residents died there to 20,000.

[lurkey]

Active tectonics of the Beichuan and Pengguan faults at the eastern margin of the Tibetan Plateau


Scientists identified earthquake faults in Sichuan, China

Only last summer research published by earth scientists in the
international journal Tectonics concluded that geological faults in the
Sichuan Basin, China “are sufficiently long to sustain a strong ground-
shaking earthquake, making them potentially serious sources of regional
seismic hazard."

The team mapped the densely populated Sichuan Basin and adjacent mountains
using what is known as ‘tectonic geomorphology’. This technique can
demonstrate significant changes in ground movement over time, such as
observations of offset river channels, disrupted floodplains, abnormally shaped
valleys and uplifted landscape features. These subtle signals of deformation,
when combined with the ability to measure the age of the disfigured landscapes
(using cosmogenic nuclides that bombard the Earth from all corners of the
universe), produced surprising results.

The recent earthquake in Sichuan occurred under some of the steepest and most
rugged mountains in the world, the Longmen Shan: the Dragon's Gate Mountains.
This dramatic range, steeper than the Himalayas, is the upturned rim of the
eastern edge of Tibet, a plateau that has risen to 5 km in response to the slow
but unstoppable collision of India with Asia that began about 55 million years ago
and which continues unabated today.

Two long faults in particular, running almost the entire length of the Longmen
Shan, showed clear evidence of slip during the last few thousands, and in some
cases hundreds, of years. The rates of slip varied between fractions of mm per
year to possibly many mm per year. Millimetre by millimetre, the Longmen Shan
are being sliced and displaced much like salami. One of these faults is likely to be
the one that gave rise to the 7.9 magnitude earthquake that has now caused
22,069 fatalities. Exactly why the Longmen Shan are here is a mystery. Unlike
the Himalaya, which form the southern boundary of Tibet and whose faults
chatter continuously with small earthquakes, faults in the Longmen Shan,
remnants perhaps of geological events hundreds of millions of years ago, have
historically only produced earthquakes up to magnitude 6.

Geomorphological evidence, described in the Tectonics paper, suggests that the
mapped faults are very steep with dominantly lateral or strike-slip displacements
taking place over time scales of thousands to hundreds of thousands of years.
This contrasts with shorter-term measurements using Global Positioning Systems
which suggest a greater proportion of thrust or shortening displacement than
lateral displacement. The observations of seismologists at the BGS suggest both
things: more thrust in the SW, nearer the epicentre, and more strike-slip toward
its direction of propagation, the NE.

[RL3AO]

6.1 aftershock.

http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSN1746452020080517

[HURAKAN]

After the earthquake, 1m Chinese flee new threat of flooding

As the rescue goes on, cracks are showing in Chinese society with the people criticising the leaders
Michael Sheridan, Far East Correspondent
MORE than a million people were on the move last night to escape the new danger of floods in remote areas blocked by earthquake debris in China’s western Sichuan province.

Soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army were seen carrying old folk in their arms out of the town of Beichuan, while the able-bod-ied fled on foot or in vehicles.

Police warned that a river choked with landslide rubble might burst its confines at any moment and inundate the town.

Some survivors were believed to be still clinging to life under Beichuan’s collapsed buildings, from where a 52-year-old man was rescued after 117 hours entombed in the ruins.

About 50 miles to the northeast, the authorities were trying to move hundreds of thousands of people from the county of Qingchuan, where rising water levels threatened to burst the banks of a lake.

According to a report on Hong Kong’s cable television network, an exodus of both civilians and military was in progress. The mass flight of earthquake victims came as China’s cabinet spokesman, Guo Weimin, said the confirmed death toll in last Monday’s quake had reached 28,881. The government expects the final figure to exceed 50,000.

It emerged yesterday that in one of the most harrowing incidents to be uncovered, more than 100 children trapped in collapsed classrooms had been overwhelmed by poisonous gas from a nearby chemical plant.

A cloud of ammonia from the plant in Yinghua, where workers died in a torrent of acid from burst pipes, drifted down a valley to Lau Sui middle and high school as staff and pupils were clearing bricks and concrete to free classmates.

Two pupils, Yang Li and Hu Ying, said they had started gasping for breath, unable to open their eyes. Another, Zhou Zhou, described children losing consciousness.

“The headmaster said to go in the opposite direction from the factory,” she said. “We had to step over bodies.” A teacher confirmed the death toll.

This weekend, reverberating shocks and landslides posed a continuous hazard that was intensified around the dams and reservoirs carved out of the granite mountains in Sichuan, one of the most active earthquake zones in the world.

The feats of soldiers and helicopter pilots in the face of danger drew praise from Chinese victims and foreign tourists rescued from disaster. In contrast to the inertia of the reclusive Burmese military junta after the cyclone of May 3, the Chinese state responded by mobilising 130,000 troops, sending rescue teams, organising medical aid and scrambling more than 100 helicopters to the misty valleys.

Domestic and foreign media coverage of the disaster has been extensive, compared with the funereal silence that enveloped the 240,000 dead of the Tang-shan earthquake of 1976, China’s last seismic catastrophe.

Like politicians in most countries, President Hu Jintao and his premier, Wen Jiabao, flew in to offer comfort and support, all televised on the evening news to assure public opinion that everything possible was being done.

China has welcomed specialist earthquake rescuers from Japan, its wartime foe, while teams from Singapore, South Korea and Russia also got to work yesterday. Two giant US Air Force cargo planes were en route as well, bringing tents, lanterns and meals. A jumbo jet loaded with aid from the democratically ruled island of Taiwan was accepted with good grace. However, British experts were still waiting for visas in Hong Kong.

The scale of the task is daunting: hospitals in Sichuan have taken in 116,460 patients, according to the state news agency, Xinhua.

If the immediate demands are humanitarian, however, the implications of the calamity are also political and diplomatic.

As national grief turns into public questioning, the Communist party leadership has issued strict guidelines to the Chinese media to channel coverage in a “positive” way. The media and internet commentators have already criticised official corruption in building standards that turned schools into deathtraps.

Inevitably, many people, echoing victims of Hurricane Katrina in the United States, complained of help that came too little and too late.

The earthquake has also emboldened a popular Chinese tradition of irreverence for leaders combined with pride in the ordinary people. “Let’s not sing the praises of leaders while the whole nation is mourning,” said one daring netizen on the Xinhua website.

The political risk for the Communist party is likely to intensify as hard questions are asked about the central planning policies that put so many people and industrial plants in an earthquake zone. The factories and towns hidden away in Sichuan’s valleys are the legacy of one of Mao Tse-tung’s least-known but most grandiose projects.

Fearing a nuclear attack by the United States or the Soviet Union, Mao ordered the construction of a redoubt to shelter China’s defence industry. He gave the task to Deng Xiaoping, a native of Sichuan. Starting in the 1950s, Deng built an impregnable arsenal hidden by the mountains.

He built tunnels, dammed rivers, threw railways across gorges, drove highways through the wilderness, installed power stations, nuclear weapons plants, steelworks, chemical factories and arms workshops, some hidden in caverns. Standards were shoddy and hundreds died as “worker-martyrs”. The project was bigger than the Roosevelt New Deal or Stalin’s first five-year plan and it consumed between 40% and 45% of China’s capital budget from 1965-75.

It was all done in total secrecy. “Populations were moved from Shanghai and Tianjin into towns that appeared on no maps,” wrote Harrison Salisbury in his dual biography of Mao and Deng. Nobody dared question either man about the decision to locate these industries and all their people along an active tectonic boundary.

Times have changed in China, however, and one immediate policy question is whether these vulnerable industries and towns should ever be rebuilt.

The government will face an immediate challenge to “social stability” in housing and caring for thousands of homeless families. More than 4m homes were damaged or destroyed. Water supply has been cut off in 20 cities and counties. Tent camps are springing up to shelter displaced families. Just north of Chengdu, the provincial capital, 2,000 people are occupying the town square in Shi-fang.

A year marked with the lucky Chinese number eight and to be crowned by the Beijing Olympics has so far been scarred by ill fortune: destructive snowstorms, the Tibetan uprising - and now the most catastrophic earthquake since 1976. In Chinese culture, such omens commonly herald the fall of a dynasty.