ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, February 5, 1996 TAG: 9602050028
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-8 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: BEIJING
SOURCE: The New York Times
China mobilized its military Sunday for rescue work and appealed for international assistance after a powerful earthquake leveled thousands of mud-walled village homes Saturday night and killed more than 200 people in the southern province of Yunnan.
Daylight on Sunday revealed a vista of devastation in Lijiang and Zhongdian counties, 200 miles northwest of the provincial capital, Kunming, as rescue workers struggled to cope with 14,000 injured residents, 3,800 of them with serious injuries, according to the state-run New China News Agency.
The most seriously injured were being evacuated by military helicopters as local hospitals and medical clinics were overrun with victims.
Freezing nighttime temperatures and terrifying aftershocks sent hundreds of thousands of shivering victims and residents into open areas, adding to the chaos of rescue work. An estimated 186,000 houses collapsed, and as many as 300,000 people have fled homes damaged by the major quake, which struck at 7:14 p.m. local time and measured 7.0 on the Richter scale.
China's state television service broadcast images of bloodied and dazed survivors groping for assistance in a torchlight scene of pandemonium. Lying east of northern Burma, the remote mountain area is about 1,300 miles southwest of Beijing.
A section of the Lijiang Hotel was reported to have collapsed, and Zhongdian remained cut off from communications Sunday. Ten percent of the old houses in Lijiang ``have been toppled,'' the state news agency said, and ``water and power supplies have been knocked out.''
In the first 26 hours after the first temblor, local seismologists recorded 184 aftershocks, including 18 that measured 4.0 to 4.8. They warned that aftershocks as strong as 6.0 could be expected in the next few days, making it unsafe for countless thousands to return to damaged structures or to mud-walled homes that are vulnerable to collapse.
``We don't have enough tents for people whose houses have collapsed,'' a rescue worker told the Reuters news agency by telephone.
A rescue team leader was reported killed in the belated collapse of a house from which he had pulled two injured children.
Temperatures dropped to several degrees below freezing overnight, prompting rescue workers to appeal for blankets, food and medicine.
Nearly 2,000 soldiers from provincial units of the Chinese army and other militia forces were sent to the area Sunday, and Wu Bangguo, a deputy prime minister, flew to the area to direct relief operations.
Sun Baiqiu, vice president of the Red Cross Society of China, said Sunday the organization had begun rescue operations in the region and appealed for prompt assistance from abroad.
LENGTH: Medium: 56 lines KEYWORDS: FATALITYby CNB