CHENGDU, China — A powerful earthquake toppled buildings, schools and chemical plants Monday in central China, killing about 10,000 people and trapping untold numbers in mounds of concrete, steel and earth in the country’s worst quake in three decades.
The 7.9-magnitude quake devastated a region of small cities and towns set amid steep hills north of Sichuan’s provincial capital of Chengdu. Striking in midafternoon, it emptied office buildings across the country in Beijing and could be felt as far away as Vietnam.
As today dawned, rescuers were frantically searching for more survivors, but rain was compounding the difficulty. Premier Wen Jiabao, who flew to the region, said rain was forecast for the next several days.
The government was pouring in troops to aid in the disaster recovery. The state-run news agency Xinhua said 16,000 were in the area and 34,000 more were en route.
Snippets from state media and photos posted on the Internet underscored the immense scale of the devastation. In the town of Juyuan, south of the epicenter, a three-story high school collapsed, burying as many as 900 students and killing at least 50, Xinhua said. Photos showed people using cranes, mechanical hoists and their hands to remove slabs of concrete and steel.
Buried teenagers struggled to break free from the rubble, “while others were crying out for help,” Xinhua said. Families waited in the rain near the wreckage as rescuers wrote the names of the dead on a blackboard, Xinhua said.
Parents of the dead students built makeshift religious altars at the site, resting the corpses on any available piece of plywood or cardboard, and burning paper money and incense in a traditional honor for their child in the afterlife, according to National Public Radio’s Melissa Block.
Home of pandas struck
The earthquake hit one of the last homes of the giant panda at the Wolong Nature Reserve and panda breeding center, in Wenchuan county, which remained out of contact, Xinhua said. But the agency reported that 60 pandas at another breeding center in Chengdu were safe.
In Chengdu, it crashed telephone networks and hours later left parts of the city of 10 million in darkness.
“We can’t get to sleep. We’re afraid of the earthquake. We’re afraid of all the shaking,” said 52-year-old factory worker Huang Ju, who took her ailing, elderly mother out of the Jinjiang District People’s Hospital. Outside, Huang sat in a wheelchair wrapped in blankets while her mother slept in a hospital bed next to her.
The overall death toll increased to about 10,000, Xinhua reported today. It said nearly 10,000 people died in central China’s Sichuan province alone and 300 others in three other provinces and in the mega-city of Chongqing.
Worst affected were four counties, including the quake’s epicenter in Wenchuan, 60 miles northwest of Chengdu. Landslides left roads impassable today, causing the government to order soldiers into the area on foot, state television said. Heavy rain prevented four military helicopters from landing.
Wenchuan’s Communist Party secretary appealed for airdrops of tents, food and medicine.
“We also need medical workers to save the injured people here,” Xinhua quoted Wang Bin as telling other officials by phone.
Huge ammonia spill
To the east, in Beichuan county, 80 percent of the buildings fell, and 10,000 people were injured, aside from 3,000 to 5,000 dead, Xinhua said. State media said two chemical plants in an industrial zone of the city of Shifang collapsed, spilling more than 80 tons of toxic liquid ammonia. The news agency said about 600 people died in Shifang and up to 2,300 were buried by rubble.
Though slow to release information at first, the government and its state media ramped up quickly.
Premier Wen, a geologist by training, held an early-morning emergency meeting near Chengdu and ordered troops and police to clear the road north to Wenchuan.
“We must try our best to open up roads to the epicenter and rescue people trapped in disaster-hit areas,” he said. Wen said the earthquake “was more serious” than expected.
Pressure for a rapid response was particularly intense, with the government already grappling with public discontent over high inflation and a widespread uprising among Tibetans in western China while trying to prepare for the Aug. 8-24 Beijing Olympics.
In Beijing, the Olympic stadiums, arenas and other venues for the games were undamaged.
The massive Three Gorges dam, the world’s largest, about 350 miles to the east of the epicenter, also was not affected, officials said.
U.S. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said no aid requests had been made by China.
The quake was the deadliest since one in 1976 in the city of Tangshan near Beijing that killed 240,000 — although some reports say as many as 655,000 perished — the most devastating in modern history. A 1933 quake near where Monday’s struck killed at least 9,000, according to geologists.
Monday’s quake occurred on a fault where South Asia pushes against the Eurasian land mass, smashing the Sichuan plain into mountains leading to the Tibetan highlands.
Much of the area has been closed to foreign media and travelers since the Tibetan protests in March, compounding the difficulties of getting information.
Roads sealed off
Roads north from Chengdu to the disaster area were sealed off early today to all but emergency convoys.
In Chengdu, nervous residents spent the night outside. State media, citing the Sichuan seismology bureau, reported 313 aftershocks.
Although initially measured at 7.8 magnitude, the U.S. Geological Survey later revised its assessment of the quake to 7.9. Its depth — about 6 miles below the surface, according to the USGS — gave the tremor such wide impact, geologists said.
“It was really scary to be on the 26th floor in something like that,” said Tom Weller, a 49-year-old American oil and gas consultant staying at the Holiday Inn. “You had to hold on to something like that or you’d fall over.”
