BEIJING — Two earthquakes jolted the capital of Tibet and surrounding areas Monday, killing more than 30 people and collapsing hundreds of houses, China’s state news agency said.
Rescuers rushed in to try to save people buried in rubble.
The U.S. Geological Survey said the first quake measured magnitude 6.6 and struck at 4:30 p.m. 50 miles west of Lhasa.
The second temblor measuring magnitude 5.1 hit about 15 minutes later, about 60 miles west of the Tibetan capital, it said.
Thirty people died and hundreds of houses collapsed in Gedar township near the epicenter in Dangxiong County, and traffic and telecommunications were cut. An unknown number of people were trapped, and soldiers and rescue workers were dispatched to the site, the official Xinhua News Agency said.
Deaths also were reported in a neighboring county, Xinhua said, but no figures were available. The Lhasa airport and the Qinghai-Tibet railway — which stretches from western Qinghai province to Tibet — continued to operate, the agency said.
China’s far west is fairly earthquake prone. On Sunday, a magnitude-5.7 earthquake shook the Xinjiang region, which borders Tibet, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, which also suffered a 6.6-magnitude quake hours later. At least 72 people were killed when a village collapsed.
More than 100 people were injured, Emergency Situations Minister Kamchybek Tashiyev said.
“What we’ve seen is terrible, the village of Nura is completely destroyed — 100 percent,” Tashiyev said.
A 7.9-magnitude earthquake on May 12 devastated parts of Sichuan province, just east of Tibet, killing 70,000 people and leaving 5 million homeless.
