At least 42 dead in China landslide
2013-01-11 22:27
Beijing - A landslide killed at least 42 people including
seven from a single family when it smashed into a remote village in south-western
China on Friday, state media said.
Another two people were sent to hospital after being
rescued from the debris while at least two more were still missing after the
landslip engulfed 16 homes in the village of Gaopo, the official news agency
Xinhua said.
Photos posted on Yunnan Web, run by the Yunnan provincial
government showed rescuers in orange uniforms digging in wide swathes of clumpy
mud against a backdrop of snow-covered, terraced hills.
A video posted on a Chinese social networking site
appeared to show a group of villagers digging through thick mud and debris to
uncover a body, which was carried away on a stretcher.
"The landslide, which brought about several hundred
thousand cubic metres of watery mud to the village, buried all of the houses
there," Xinhua quoted a local rescue team leader, Sun Anfa, as saying.
The conditions "created great difficulties for
rescue efforts amid low temperatures", he added.
More than 1 000 rescuers were sent to the site of the
landslide, which was estimated to be 300m long, 80m wide and 30m deep,
according to authorities.
Snow was visible in images of the rescue, in an area that
has experienced unusually low temperatures in recent weeks, with China
suffering what authorities have called its coldest winter in 28 years.
The Communist Party's top leaders Xi Jinping and Li
Keqiang, along with Premier Wen Jiabao, ordered "all-out efforts to rescue
victims", Xinhua said, adding that more than 1 000 rescuers were on the
scene.
Yunnan province, which borders Myanmar, Thailand, Laos
and Vietnam, is a relatively impoverished area of China, where rural houses are
often cheaply constructed.
Gaopo is in Zhenxiong county, in the northeast of Yunnan,
a temperate province known for its tobacco industry and for being the home of
Pu'er tea.
But its mountainous areas are prone to landslides and it
is also vulnerable to earthquakes.
Two in September - one of magnitude 5.7 - left 81 people
dead and hundreds injured.
Prime Minister Wen Jiabao made an overnight trip to the
quake zone at the time to comfort survivors, many of whom had taken refuge in
tents erected on a public square.
A county neighbouring Zhenxiong was hit by a landslide in
October that killed 18 children, after one which killed 216 people in 1991,
according to the US Geological Survey.
An earthquake in neighbouring Sichuan province in 2008
claimed around 70 000 lives - the worst natural disaster to hit China in three
decades, with shoddy buildings blamed for the high toll.
- SAPA
