BEIJING — More than 140 people in southwestern China are feared to have been
buried under an avalanche of mud and rocks when a hillside collapsed on
Saturday, Chinese news media reported. 6/23/17
The landslide struck Xinmo, a village in Sichuan Province, early
in the morning. Although the number of possible deaths remained unclear,
officials estimated that 40 homes appeared to have been engulfed, Sichuan Online, a provincial news agency, reported. At that hour, many
residents would probably have been in their homes.
Xinhua, the official news agency, said that 141 people were
missing. The Communist Party secretary of Sichuan, Wang Dongming, and other
officials were rushing to the village, in a sign of the gravity of the
disaster, Sichuan Daily said.
Li Yuanjun, a local official who arrived in the village shortly
after the slide, said he saw near total devastation. “In the entire village I
could only see one home,” Mr. Li told the Sichuan Daily. “The rest had been
totally buried by rocks.”
The police and rescue workers arrived at the village and began
searching buried ruins for survivors. There were reports that at least a few
people had survived. State media outlets said a couple and their baby had been
rescued. Still, many people appeared to be trapped in their homes.
Some residents stuck under the mud and rock used cellphones to
call emergency lines, according to local news reports. One woman cried out from
under the earth, Wang Yongbo, a firefighter, told Chinese television news.
“A woman shouted and dozens of troopers heard her and asked her
questions,” Mr. Wang said. She “could only use a stone to tap in response,” he
said.
Initial accounts from villagers and nearby residents said there
had been rain in the area, but some said it was not very heavy and there were
no signs of the impending landslide. The area was badly hit by an earthquake in
2008 that killed tens of thousands of people in Sichuan and nearby provinces.
“It came too suddenly,” the employee of a nearby hotel told The Paper, a Shanghai news site, of the landslide. “I didn’t sense any
signs before it happened.”
Photographs from the scene indicated that a thinly vegetated side of a hill had
toppled into a narrow valley, creating a wall of muddy earth and stones that
covered a road and choked off a small river. Mao County, which includes Xinmo, announced
a state of emergency and said rescuers were heading to the village.
By midmorning Saturday, about 500 rescuers and medical workers
were converging on the area, one news report said. But officials said they were unsure how many people
might have been buried by the landslide. China’s schools are on vacation, so
there may have been more children in the village than usual, and the scenic
area also attracts tourists.
One local police commander, Chen Tiebo, said there might have
been as many as 200 people in the village, China Central Television said.
Western Sichuan Province, where the disaster hit, is a
mountainous and remote part of the country, and the region has had landslides
before. A landslide in the province in 2013 buried about 40 people; another in 2014killed at least 11 people.
The earthquake in 2008 with an epicenter in Sichuan left nearly 90,000
people dead or missing and presumed dead after the tremors set off landslides
and blocked rivers, which multiplied the risks from more slides. Investigators
are likely to look at whether the quake left the slope above Xinmo Village
vulnerable.
Rescuers said the latest slide had also created a potentially
dangerous 1.2-mile-long blockage along the river near the buried village. Rain
is forecast for the area in the coming days.
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