By ANDREW JACOBSJIEGU, China — Rescue teams joined shovel-wielding monks in this devastated county seat on Thursday, a day after an earthquake that killed more than 700 people, as frigid temperatures threatened to claim hundreds more who remained missing, trapped beneath debris for more than a day.
Scores of thousands who survived the 7.1-magnitude quake, in rural Qinghai Province, in western China, were left without heat or shelter in weather that included high winds, sleet and below-freezing cold; nighttime temperatures were forecast to drop to the 20s.
Rescuers were hindered not just by the cold, but also by bouts of altitude sickness. The worst damage was in the town of Jiegu, at an elevation of roughly 13,000 feet on the mountainous Tibetan plateau.
Fifteen thousand homes here were reported destroyed, and despite the truckloads of supplies the government sent lumbering into the region, many survivors had little food and water and only makeshift shelter.
Relief workers and People’s Liberation Army soldiers streamed to the scene by bus and aircraft, and the state-run Xinhua news agency said 2,000 soldiers, police officers and firefighters had arrived by midday Thursday.
But hope for additional rescues was diminishing; most of those pulled from the rubble on Thursday were already dead, the police chief of Chengduo, a town about 25 miles from Jiegu, said in a telephone interview.
One rescue worker said the bodies of earthquake victims were “piled up like a hill.”
“You can see bodies with broken arms and legs, and it breaks your heart,” said the worker, Dawa Cairen, a Tibetan with the Christian aid group Amity Foundation, according to The Associated Press. “You can see lots of blood. It’s flowing like a river.”
Xinhua said 760 people were known to be dead from the quake, which hit Yushu County, near Qinghai’s border with Sichuan Province and Tibet, shortly before 8 a.m. local time Wednesday. About 1,000 were pulled alive from the rubble, but 313 more were reported missing, officials said at a Thursday news conference in Beijing. And 9,110 people were injured, more than 900 of them seriously.
With memories still sharp of the public fury after the far stronger and deadlier earthquake two years ago in Sichuan Province, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao canceled a visit to Indonesia to travel to the area to inspect the damage, state news agencies reported. President Hu Jintao was also reported to have changed his plans, cutting short his trip to a Brazil summit meeting of emerging-market nations to return to China, according to Brazilian Foreign Ministry officials quoted by Reuters.
Earlier, the government sent Vice Premier Hui Liangyu to Qinghai to oversee relief efforts, and allotted about $29 million from a state disaster fund for those operations.
The government said it would deliver 10,000 tents to Jiegu, home to most of Yushu County’s 100,000 people, by nightfall to protect survivors from the elements. Speaking at a news conference, Zuo Ming, the disaster relief director at the Ministry of Civil Affairs, said the relief efforts would ensure that no one would freeze to death.
But although trucks heaped with relief supplies labored over mountain roads toward Jiegu all day, most of the 1,000 or so frightened residents camping in the city’s main square were sheltering under constructions of wood and plastic. Many men were trying to sleep outside.
Most said they had received rice porridge in the morning but no other food or water.
A group of monks from a monastery stopped by a medical tent and asked for disinfectant. The monks said they had 1,000 bodies in their temple. “Yesterday we had 500 bodies,” said one, “and today they kept coming in.”
Hundreds of others, many badly injured, were camping out at the sports stadium.
Many people were worried about a forecast of rain for Friday.
The police chief of Chengduo, Da Ji, said the situation was extremely difficult.
“As we are still very short of manpower; many dead bodies remain unburied in the street,” he said Thursday evening after returning from a day of rescue work in Yushu. “People could be seen openly weeping and crying in the street, either for the loss of their loved ones or out of personal injuries. There were also people shouting, trying to locate their missing children. So the place is pretty chaotic.”
Until outside help began pouring in Thursday afternoon, he said, most rescue workers were monks from nearby monasteries. Some monasteries were themselves hit hard. The Associated Press said as many as 70 Buddhist monks had been reported dead in the collapse of one monastery, Thrangu, about six miles outside of Jiegu.
Some of the worst casualties occurred at local schools. Xinhua reported at least 66 students and 10 teachers dead, including 32 victims at an elementary school.
The student victims evoked painful memories of the May 2008 earthquake in Sichuan, where school collapses — widely blamed on shoddy construction — killed more than 5,000 children. The Chinese government has played down the role of poor construction in the collapses.
It was unclear what role construction quality played in collapses in Yushu, where about 70 percent of the buildings were built not of concrete, but of wood and mud. China has moved to strengthen earthquake resistance in schools and public buildings after the Sichuan quake, but the effort remains a work in progress, Mr. Zuo said.
Many rescuers and even rescue dogs brought in to search for victims have been suffering from altitude sickness, said Miao Chonggang, the deputy director of the China Earthquake Administration’s quake relief operations.
“The rescue teams themselves are facing a shortage of shelter and food, and have to deal with the chilly weather,” Mr. Miao said. “This kind of long-distance rescue operation is an extremely difficult mission.”
Along the rutted 600-mile highway linking Yushu to the provincial capital, Xining, traffic was light on Thursday, with most vehicles bearing provisions, concrete electric poles and, in the case of one slow-moving truck, coal.
Several flatbed trucks carried excavators and other earthmoving equipment. Most of the relief vehicles bore red banners brimming with patriotic enthusiasm, like one that proclaimed: “Fight against the earthquake. Stage a rescue effort and rebuild our home.”
Li Bibo contributed research from Beijing. Michael Wines and Xiyun Yang contributed reporting from Beijing.
