HANWANG, China — Soldiers rushed to shore up a dam cracked by this week’s powerful earthquake, and rescuers came by helicopter and ship Wednesday into the isolated epicenter but were forced to dig for survivors with their bare hands.
Nearly 26,000 people remained buried in collapsed buildings from Monday’s magnitude-7.9 earthquake, and the death toll of almost 15,000 was expected to climb as relief operations spread into the mountains of Sichuan province. The quake triggered landslides that blocked roads to the hardest-hit areas.
Even as the rescue effort seemed to gather momentum — speeded by clearing weather after two days of rain — caring for tens of thousands of people across the disaster zone has stretched thin the government’s resources.
Victims begged on roadsides, and people settled in for a third night in a growing sprawl of camps littered with garbage.
“I’m numb,” said Zhao Xiaoli, a 25-year- old nurse at a makeshift triage center outside a tire factory. “The first day, hundreds of kids died when a school collapsed. The rest who came in had serious injuries. There was so little we could do for them.”
Damage to 2-year-old Zipingpu Dam threatened downstream communities still digging out from the quake. About 2,000 soldiers were sent to the dam, the official Xinhua News Agency said.
Four-inch cracks scarred the top of the dam, and landslides had poured down the surrounding hills, the business news magazine Caijing said on its website.
Although the government pronounced the dam safe late Tuesday after an inspection, Caijing said its waters were being emptied to relieve pressure. The Ministry of Water Resources said nearly 400 dams, most of them small, were damaged by the quake.
The massive Three Gorges dam, the world’s largest, is about 350 miles east of the epicenter. Officials said this week it was not damaged.
The official death toll rose Wednesday to 14,866, and in Sichuan province, another 25,788 people were buried and 1,405 were missing, said Li Chengyun, the provincial vice governor, according to Xinhua.
An already massive military operation gathered pace with close to 100,000 soldiers and police mobilized. After two days of rain that prevented relief flights, People’s Liberation Army helicopters flew 90 sorties to the epicenter in Wenchuan county and other areas to drop food, medicine and tents and ferry out 156 injured people, Xinhua reported.
Aerial TV footage showed rows of small buildings flattened in Yingxiu in Wenchuan county, where rescuers who hiked in said they found only 2,300 survivors in the town of about 10,000, with another 1,000 badly hurt, Xinhua reported.
The scale of the devastation is raising questions about the quality of China’s recent construction boom. Some builders cut corners, especially in outlying areas largely populated by the very young and very old.
The death toll from the quake was expected to rise when rescuers reach other towns in Wenchuan county that are still cut off.
Onlookers erupted into cheers and applause Wednesday when a 34-year-old woman who was eight months pregnant was rescued after spending 50 hours under debris in the Dujiangyan area.
But the rescuers called off the search for four others still trapped in the collapsed building, leaving only a smaller crew using dogs to sniff for signs of life.
