BEIJING: At least 14 people died, hundreds more were injured and thousands of houses collapsed when a magnitude 5.7 earthquake struck near a popular tourist destination in east China yesterday, officials said.
The quake, the biggest in the region in half a century, could be felt in cities hundreds of kilometers away when it hit at 8.49am (0049 GMT), according to the China National Seismic Observation Network.
“We’d just finished our breakfast, when we heard a huge roar, like someone setting off really loud firecrackers,” said a civil affairs official in the city of Ruichang in Jiangxi province.
“Then the houses started shaking, and we just jumped outside,” the official, surnamed Liu, said by telephone.
Seven hours after the quake, official media reported 14 were confirmed dead, while more than 370 had been injured, 20 of them seriously.
Hundreds of thousands of people were also reported to have fled their homes, fearing further quakes.
The epicenter was near the city of Jiujiang, home to half a million people and a traditional scenic spot that was praised by Tang dynasty poets more than a millennium ago.
Thousands of rural homes were flattened in the quake, one official said by telephone.
The US Geological Survey said the quake occurred about 10km below the surface of the earth.
That makes it a so-called “shallow” earthquake, similar to the devastating quake that struck in Kashmir in early October, a category of tremor generally known to cause greater damage than deeper ones.
In the first hours after disaster struck, local officials struggled to assess the human toll exacted in their respective areas.
The State Seismic Bureau said five had been killed in Ruichang city, seven in Jiujiang, and two more in Wuxue, a city in neighboring Hubei province, Xinhua news agency reported.
A relatively powerful aftershock was felt at about 12.55pm, the sina.com website reported.
In and around Ruichang, a total of 420,000 people had left their homes, apparently fearing the morning’s earthquake might not be the last, according to Xinhua’s website.
“Basically, everyone in Ruichang is right now out huddling in the street,” said Liu, the civil affairs official. “I guess by night fall we may need tents and blankets for them.”
The International Red Cross had sent 500 tents to the disaster region, and would dispatch another 2,000 on Sunday, sina.com said.
In Beijing, the civil affairs ministry was getting ready to send emergency relief supplies to the affected region, while a specialist earthquake task force left the capital around mid-day, according to Xinhua.
Shock waves could be felt as far away as Wuhan, a large industrial city on the Yangtze river more than 100km away, sina.com reported.
The website carried photos reportedly taken in Wuhan early yesterday, showing cracked walls and toppled mannequins inside shops.
“It felt like someone was yanking you violently,” an Wuhan eyewitness told sina.com.
In the city of Changsha, the capital of Hunan province located 300km away, the tremor could also be felt, according to the China News Service.
Gao Jianguo, a leading earthquake expert, was quoted by sina.com as saying the affected area was not known as an active seismic area.
“The biggest earthquake in recent years in Jiangxi struck in 1987, measuring 5.5 on the Richter scale,” he was quoted as saying. “This is the biggest earthquake since 1949” to hit the region.-AFP |
