Hard Aftershock Topples More Buildings in China

By Jake Hooker

A massive aftershock hit a poor, mountainous region of Sichuan Province on Sunday, toppling thousands of buildings and injuring hundreds, as China struggled to find shelter for millions of earthquake refugees.

The tremor in Qingchuan County, measured by the U.S. Geological Survey as having a magnitude of 5.8, hit at 4:21 p.m. local time.

By Sunday evening, Xinhua, the official news agency, had reported one death and 260 injuries. A government spokesman in Qingchuan said emergency medical teams were responding to calls for help from six townships, Xinhua reported, and the total number of casualties was not yet known.

Another official in Guangyuan County, east of Qingchuan, told Xinhua that the aftershock had caused 71,300 homes to collapse, though it was unclear how such a precise count had been made in a matter of hours.

The tremor struck in a rough and remote area of northern Sichuan, on the border of Gansu Province, and it damaged roads, toppled old buildings and caused several fires in one town, Xinhua reported.

The aftershock came as the government intensified its efforts to find shelter for earthquake survivors, pledging to build 1.5 million temporary houses. Also Sunday, state television reported that rescuers had saved an 80-year-old man who had lived for nearly two weeks in a collapsed building.

The rescue, made Friday, was trumpeted in the state-run media, but Chinese officials were clearly shifting the relief effort toward finding shelter for millions of refugees. The government has previously said the earthquake left five million people homeless, but Xinhua quoted a vice governor of Sichuan Province, Huang Yanrong, on Sunday saying that there were more than 11 million homeless.

The death toll rose past 62,000 on Sunday, and while rescue efforts continued, the chances of finding more trapped survivors was dwindling every day.

Meanwhile, a senior official in Beijing warned that 69 dams in the earthquake region could be in danger of collapsing. To reduce risks, officials have already drained numerous reservoirs in the region to ease pressure on the structures.

On Saturday, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao held an impromptu news conference at a tent camp in Yingxiu at the earthquake’s epicenter. He said that the government’s efforts were shifting from rescuing people buried under fallen buildings to caring for the homeless.

Speaking through a megaphone and surrounded by mountains veiled in fog, Wen said that tents had been transported to disaster areas from other provinces but that there was still a severe shortage, according to official news reports.

In a sign that manufacturing shelters for the homeless was among the top priorities, President Hu Jintao visited a factory in northern Hebei Province on Sunday that makes prefabricated houses. Last week, Hu visited a plant in southern China that manufactures tents. The government has ordered manufacturers nationwide to produce and deliver 30,000 tents every day to earthquake-hit areas every day.

In the city of Dujiangyan, thousands of people were sleeping in blue disaster tents set up in rows on a college campus. A local restaurant chain served hot meals every day. Doctors with the Chinese Red Cross prepared stews of medicinal herbs for the ailing. Last week, volunteers from a hair salon gave refugees free haircuts.

Zhou Dezheng, 58, a retired architect, has been staying in a government-issued disaster relief tent with his family and two others. "We are better off than refugees in most countries," he said in an interview last week. "We have tents. We have food."

Many buildings in Dujiangyan, like Zhou’s home, cracked but did not collapse. Virtually every apartment building in the city of 100,000 was empty.

The residents of Dujiangyan, a city only a one-hour drive from the provincial capital, Chengdu, the headquarters of the relief effort, are relatively lucky. They have food, water and shelter.

But in hundreds of villages in the surrounding countryside, many families have not received sturdy steel-framed tents. Instead, they must make do with makeshift shelters made with bamboo poles and tarpaulins. Late last week, several farmers who hiked out of mountainous Hongkou Township, west of Dujiangyan, said there was not enough food and drinking water there.

A day after Wen said the government was on alert for secondary disasters, in particular floods that could be caused by the breaching of lakes formed when rivers were blocked by landslides, the state media reported Sunday that 1,600 soldiers had marched to one of the lakes in Tangjiashan, with orders to blast away the landslide behind which water has been rising for days. Helicopters have not been able to land troops in the region because of bad weather.

If the barrier holding back water in the Tangjiashan quake lake is breached, a flash flood could threaten the lives of 70,000 people downstream, the state media reported.