HANWANG, China — Soldiers rushed to shore up a dam cracked by this week’s earthquake, and rescuers came by helicopter and ship into the isolated epicenter but were forced to dig for survivors with their bare hands amid aftershocks today.
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 areas that were hit hardest.
Homeless victims begged for aid on roadsides, and people settled in for a third night in a growing sprawl of refugee 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 the 2-year-old Zipingpu Dam threatened downstream communities still digging out from the quake. About 2,000 soldiers were sent to the dam, the Xinhua News Agency said.
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 Three Gorges dam, the world’s largest, is about 350 miles east of the epicenter. It wasn’t damaged, officials said.
The official death toll rose Wednesday to 14,866, and in Sichuan province another 25,788 people were buried and 1,405 were missing, provincial vice governor Li Chengyun said, according to Xinhua.
Close to 100,000 soldiers and police have been mobilized. After two days of rain that prevented flights, helicopters flew 90 sorties to the epicenter in Wenchuan county and other areas to drop food, medicine and tents, and then ferry out 156 injured people, Xinhua reported.
But today, the Defense Ministry ordered 100 more helicopters into areas of Sichuan, underscoring worries that deaths will skyrocket unless help for the needy arrives soon, Xinhua said.
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 agency reported today that aftershocks in Yingxiu had collapsed some of the remaining buildings and set off landslides.
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.
With help slow in arriving, some fled Yingxiu on foot, carrying injured family members in wheelbarrows.
Unlike previous natural disasters in China, official media have reported prominently on the quake, and state TV replaced regular programming with 24-hour coverage.
Amid the tragedy, onlookers erupted into cheers and applause when a 34-year- old woman who was eight months pregnant was rescued after spending 50 hours under debris in the Dujiangyan area.
“It’s a miracle brought about by us all working together,” said Sun Guoli, fire chief of the nearby provincial capital, Chengdu, who supervised the rescue.
