900 students buried by earthquake in China

A powerful earthquake struck a mountainous region of western China on Monday, killing at least 107 people and trapping more than 900 students beneath a collapsed high school as tremors shook buildings for hundreds of miles, according to interviews and reports in China’s state media.
The 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck in Sichuan Province on Monday afternoon and raised immediate concerns that the death toll could rapidly rise. State media reports said “rows of houses” had collapsed near the quake’s epicenter. By early evening, state media had reported 107 deaths and 34 injuries in four provinces.

President Hu Jintao ordered an “all out” effort to aid people in the earthquake region while soldiers were dispatched for disaster relief efforts. Prime Minister Wen Jiabao was already flying to the scene.

Minutes after the western temblor, a second, smaller quake struck hundreds of miles away, near Beijing. Thousands of office workers were evacuated, while officials warned that other aftershocks could hit the capital later in the evening.

“I suddenly felt very dizzy, as if I were heavily drunk,” said Zeng Hui, who works on the 22nd floor of an office tower in Beijing. “I thought I was seriously ill, then I looked around and saw my colleagues felt the same way. We were stunned.”

The initial quake struck at 2:28 p.m., or 2:28 a.m., Eastern time, near Wenchuan County, according to China’s State Seismological Bureau. People across much of China and as far away as Thailand and Vietnam reported feeling the tremors.

Wenchuan is home to the Wolong Nature Reserve, the country’s most famous panda reserve, and is located about 55 miles from Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan, which has a population of roughly 12 million people.

Early reports and telephone interviews suggested that Chengdu had been spared any significant problems, but officials were struggling to assess the full scope of the damage in Wenchuan and elsewhere because of the disruption in communications caused by the earthquake. More than 2,300 cell phone towers were knocked down by the quake, according to China Mobile, the country’s top carrier.

Xinhua, the official news agency, said the 107 fatalities were spread across Sichuan, neighboring Chongqing Municipality as well as in Gansu and Yunnan provinces. Damage is believed to be especially severe in Dujiangyan, a county of 600,000 people located near the epicenter. One local official described rows of collapsed houses, Xinhua reported.

Early Monday evening, Xinhua also flashed an emergency report from Dujiangyan describing that nearly 900 students were feared trapped after a high school collapsed. Most of the telephones in the city were not functioning, and the Xinhua report could not be independently verified.

Earlier in the day, the first reports of fatalities came in the east in Chongqing Municipality, where two primary schools were damaged. Four pupils died and more than 100 others were injured, state media reported. Another person was reportedly killed beneath a collapsed water tower in Sichuan Province.

China is prone to seismic activity and has suffered horrific earthquakes in the recent past. In 1976, a 7.8 magnitude earthquake hit the city of Tangshan, located roughly 70 miles from Beijing. More than 240,000 people were killed and nearly every building was leveled. Communist Party officials initially covered up the extent of the death toll. Many of China’s biggest cities, including Beijing, are located in high-risk earthquake zones.

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