BREAKING NEWS: Deadly earthquake hit Sichuan, China – Death toll now at 157, more than 6,000 injured

 

At least 156 people have been killed and thousands more left injured after a powerful earthquake jolted China's Sichuan province near the same area where a devastating quake struck five years ago.

More than 5,500 people are reported to have been injured in the earthquake which struck mountainous Lushan county shortly after 8am this morning local time, and 19 people have been reported missing in the wake of the tremor.

The earthquake, while not as destructive as the one in 2008, toppled buildings, triggered landslides and disrupted phone and power connections in the region.

The village of Longmen was hit particularly hard, with authorities saying nearly all the buildings there had been destroyed by the terrifying minute-long tremor.

The China Earthquake Administration said at least 156 people had died, including 96 in Lushan. In the jurisdiction of Ya'an, which administers Lushan, 19 people were reported missing and more than 5,500 people were injured, the administration said.

'It was such a big quake that everyone was scared,' said a woman who answered the phone at a kindergarten hours later and declined to give her name. 'We all fled for our lives.'

Emergency workers turned the square outside the Lushan County Hospital into a triage center, where medical personnel bandaged bleeding victims, according to footage on China Central Television.

Rescuers used dynamite to clear boulders that had fallen across roads to reach Longmen and other damaged areas lying farther up the mountain valleys, state media reported.

The quake - measured by the earthquake administration at magnitude-7.0 and by the U.S. Geological Survey at 6.6 - struck the steep hills of Lushan county shortly after 8 a.m., when many people were at home, sleeping or having breakfast.

People in their underwear and wrapped in blankets ran into the streets of Ya'an and even the provincial capital of Chengdu, 70 miles east of Lushan, according to photos, video and accounts posted online.

The quake's shallow depth, less than 8 miles, is likely to have magnified its impact. 

Chengdu's airport shut down for about an hour before reopening, though many flights were cancelled or delayed, and its railway station halted dozens of scheduled train rides Saturday, state media said.

Lushan reported the most deaths, but there was concern that casualties in neighboring Baoxing county might have been under-reported because of inaccessibility after roads were blocked and power and phone services cut off.

As the region went into the first night after the quake, rain started to fall, slowing rescue work.

Forecasts are pointing to more rain over the coming days, and the China Meteorological Administration warned of possible landslides and other geological disasters.

Tens of thousands of people moved into tents or cars, unable to return home or too afraid to go back as aftershocks continued to jolt the region.

Lushan, where the quake struck, lies where the fertile Sichuan plain meets foothills that eventually rise to the Tibetan plateau and sits atop the Longmenshan fault. It was along that fault line that a devastating magnitude-7.9 quake struck on May 12, 2008, leaving more than 90,000 people dead or missing and presumed dead in one of the worst natural disasters to strike China in recent decades.

'It was just like May 12,' Liu Xi, a writer in Ya'an city, who was jolted awake by today's quake, said via a private message on his account on Sina Corporation's Twitter-like Weibo service. 'All the home decorations fell at once, and the old house cracked.'

The official Xinhua News Agency said the well-known Bifengxia panda preserve, which is near Lushan, was not affected by the quake. Dozens of pandas were moved to Bifengxia from another preserve, Wolong, after its habitat was wrecked by the 2008 quake.

As in most natural disasters, the government mobilized thousands of soldiers and others - 7,000 people by this afternoon - sending excavators and other heavy machinery as well as tents, blankets and other emergency supplies.

Two soldiers died after the vehicle that they and more than a dozen others were in slipped off the road and rolled down a cliff, state media reported.

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