Earthquake victims in China suffer from bitter cold - now 134 dead
Almost a thousand people suffered injuries, according to the state news agency Xinhua. Tens of thousands of buildings were destroyed or damaged. According to CCTV, 13 people were still missing in Qinghai province.
The search for possible survivors has now been suspended, a representative of the Gansu disaster control authority announced on Wednesday. The main task now is to treat the injured and find accommodation for the residents who have been left homeless. According to CCTV, 87,000 people in Gansu alone have been accommodated in "temporary shelters".
Near the epicenter in the Gansu district of Jishishan, numerous survivors spent the night on Wednesday in tents improvised from wooden poles and tarpaulins, as the AFP reporter reported. The only source of warmth in temperatures as low as minus 17 degrees were outdoor stoves and blankets that people were able to fetch from their destroyed homes.
One woman camped outside a mosque said she was afraid to return to her house. "We can't go back inside, it's too dangerous." Inside the house, bricks or roof tiles could fall down "at any time". Another affected person complained: "There are eight of us in our family, but we were only given three portions of instant noodles."
According to state media, 2,500 tents, 20,000 coats and 5,000 folding beds were sent to the disaster area. Emergency services unloaded large bundles of relief supplies and more tents. According to official information, thousands of firefighters and rescue workers were sent to the earthquake zone to support the earthquake victims.
According to Chinese data, the quake had a magnitude of 6.2, the US earthquake monitoring system USGS gave it as 5.9. The epicenter was around 100 kilometers southwest of Gansu's provincial capital Lanzhou and around 1300 kilometers southwest of the capital Beijing. The authorities warned that further tremors with a magnitude of more than 5.0 were possible in the coming days.
It was the quake in China with the most fatalities since 2014, when more than 600 people died in the southwestern province of Yunnan. The People's Republic is repeatedly shaken by earthquakes, some of which are devastating. In 2008, a 7.9-magnitude quake in Sichuan province killed more than 87,000 people. In September 2022, almost a hundred people died in an earthquake, also in Sichuan.
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Source: www.stern.de
