BEIJING (AP) – Heavy rains are complicating earthquake recovery efforts in southwestern China, where the death toll from Monday’s disaster has risen to 82.
More than 20,000 people have been moved to temporary shelters amid the threat of landslides and buildings collapsing in the mountainous region of Sichuan province, state media reported yesterday.
The rains are expected to last at least through today.
Another 35 people are missing and 270 have been hospitalised with injuries from the magnitude 6.8 quake that levelled building and sent boulders tumbling onto roads in Sichuan’s Ganze Tibetan Autonomous Region and neighbouring Ya’an city, the reports said.
Buildings were also shaken in the provincial capital of Chengdu, where 21 million people are among the 65 million Chinese under a strict COVID-19 lockdown confining them to their homes and residential compounds.
Following the quake, police and health workers in Chengdu refused to allow anxious residents outside, in adherence to the strict zero-COVID policy mandating lockdowns, quarantines and other restrictions.
The government is also discouraging domestic travel during the mid-autumn festival tomorrow and the weeklong national holiday at the start of October.
Virus outbreaks have been reported in 103 cities, the highest since the early days of the pandemic in early 2020.
Monday’s quake was centred in a mountainous area of Luding county, which sits on the edge of the Tibetan Plateau roughly 200 kilometres from Chengdu. Friction between tectonic plates in the region frequently cause earthquakes, including China’s deadliest in recent years, a 7.9-magnitude temblor in 2008 that killed nearly 90,000 people in Sichuan.
That quake devastated towns, schools and rural communities outside Chengdu, leading to a years-long effort to rebuild with more resilient materials.
