LUSHAN, China: Thousands of rescue workers combed through flattened villages in southwest China yesterday in a race to find survivors from a powerful quake as the toll of dead and missing rose past 200.
Dressed in bright orange uniforms, rescuers battled their way up mountain paths strewn with wreckage to reach isolated parts of Sichuan province on the edge of the Tibetan Plateau.
Troops had worked through the night, searching villages where houses had been destroyed for survivors and treating those injured in the quake.
The death toll rose to at least 186, the official Xinhua news agency said, but reports of casualties slowed yesterday.
More than 11,300 people were injured and 21 remain missing, Xinhua said, citing local officials.
China’s new Premier Li Keqiang rushed to the disaster zone to oversee rescue efforts in his first major public test since taking office in March, before returning to Beijing late yesterday, China Radio National reported.
Li said on Saturday that the first 24 hours was “the golden time for saving lives,” as China’s new leaders respond to a fresh disaster five years after another Sichuan earthquake left more than 90,000 people dead or missing.
The rescue operation was hampered by huge queues of traffic — some stretching back for 20 km — clogging roads into the disaster zone.
“We really want to go in and help people, but instead we are waiting in traffic,” one frustrated relief official said in his car, as large numbers of volunteers tried to head to the zone.
Boulders the size of cars littered streets in Lushan county, the epicenter of the earthquake. “Three people died in that building, and no one wants to live in this area any more because it is too dangerous,” a 45-year man surnamed Yang said, surrounded by rubble from the quake.
More than 1,300 aftershocks have followed since the quake struck Saturday morning. Chinese seismologists registered the tremor at 7.0 magnitude while the US Geological Survey gave it as 6.6.
Firefighters helped by sniffer dogs have pulled 91 people alive from the rubble, Xinhua said, citing the Ministry of Public Security.
At Lushan People’s Hospital, a steady stream of ambulances continued to arrive in the early hours yesterday. Most victims were taken to tents erected in the grounds of the hospital, where doctors treated the injured.
A 68-year-old woman with a broken arm spoke of the terror she experienced when the earthquake struck.
Hits back at US
China yesterday accused the United States of human rights violations through its military operations abroad and failing to prevent its own citizens from gun violence, in a rejoinder to a US rights report.
The report, released by China’s Parliament, the State Council, said Washington has “turned a blind eye to its own woeful human rights situation,” despite styling itself as “the world judge of human rights.”
China — which officially includes rising living standards in its definition of human rights — released the report in response to a US report published Friday that said China’s rights record has worsened over the past year.
The US report highlighted a Chinese crackdown on ethnic minorities, including Tibetans, the detention of political dissidents, as well as the widespread surveillance of citizens by a huge domestic security apparatus.
China responded by blasting US surveillance of its own citizens, and said that political donations have damaged the country’s democracy.
China’s report, culled from a variety of sources, including US media, accused US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan of causing “massive civilian casualties.”
The report also cited “astonishing” casualties that resulted from mass shootings at a movie theater in the state of Colorado in July and at an elementary school in Connecticut in December.
“Americans are the most heavily armed people in the world per capita,” the report said. It added that the US had “serious” issues with discrimination of a sexual, racial and religious nature.
