| http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2010/apr/16/china-earthquake-death-toll Rescue teams in Qinghai province in China say nearly 300 people still missing after major earthquake in Yushu The death toll following a major earthquake in western China has risen to at least 791, with another 294 people missing, rescue teams in Qinghai province said today. As the country's prime minister, Wen Jiabao, promised support for the survivors of the country's worst earthquake in two years, a spokesman for emergency workers said there were more than 1,000 seriously injured victims, the state-run Xhinhua news agency reported. Many thousands spent a second night shivering out of doors without shelter. The area around Wednesday's 7.1 magnitude quake is about 4,000m above sea level. Authorities in Yushu have dispatched dog teams and heavy lifting equipment to help rescue workers search for people trapped in the rubble. Attention focused on several schools in Jiegu, where 66 students and 10 teachers died. Chinese media and bloggers published images of three young children in blue school uniforms lying dead on the pavement - a grim echo of the high casualty rate at poorly constructed schools in Sichuan in 2008, when a bigger quake killed 87,000 people. Wen visited the ruins of a retail and residential complex, where orange-uniformed emergency workers were searching the smoking debris for three people feared buried when the structure was shaken to the ground. According to the state media, soldiers pulled almost 1,000 people out of the wreckage with their bare hands in the first 24 hours after the disaster. Tashi Taljor, a Yushu resident, said he was woken up by a small earthquake a few hours before the big one hit, but nobody evacuated. "Too many people died to count," he said. "All the houses fell down. We were all inside and we ran out. We were very scared." The streets of Jiegu are littered with concrete remnants of modern structures and the flattened mud and painted wood of traditional Tibetan buildings. According to the ministry of civil affairs, 15,000 homes have collapsed, though such a large scale of damage is not immediately apparent in the town. China Central Television says 10,000 soldiers, police, firefighters and medics have flooded into the mainly Tibetan area. Rescue workers say the remote location and high altitude have hampered their work. "It's very ghastly. The whole town has come down," Tashi Tsering told Associated Press. "Most of the houses are made of wood and mud so they have totally collapsed to the ground. I'm sure there are some alive underneath but I don't think there are many of them." Survivors needed emergency medical supplies, water, sanitation, food and clothing, he added. Fears about a cracked dam appear to have diminished, but concerns have grown about the fate of 60 missing monks at Thragu monastery, where many of the brightly painted roofs were shaken off their columns, leaving only the main hall intact. "Only seven or eight of the monks are left alive. All the rest have gone missing. The rescuers either can't find them or found their bodies," Danzeng Qiujiang, a senior cleric at the neighbouring Xiuma monastery, told reporters. |