At least 15 people were found dead, more than 100 remained missing and 62 homes were covered Saturday after a huge landslide buried the mountain village of Xinmo in China’s Sichuan province, Chinese authorities said.
A local government statement said an emergency response “to the first-class catastrophic geological disaster” was underway. More than 2,000 police, soldiers and civilians were participating in the rescue efforts, officials said.
Rescuers and local residents used ropes to move a boulder, while dozens of others, aided by dogs to sniff out humans, searched the rubble for survivors, according to videos posted online by the Maoxian government and state broadcaster CCTV.
Bulldozers and heavy diggers also were deployed to remove boulders, while villagers and soldiers lifted rocks with their bare hands. Rescuers brought spotlights to continue the search after sunset. Medics were seen treating a woman on a road.
No sign of the village could be seen in aerial footage, which revealed a grim and grey rock-strewn landscape covering that part of southwestern China where a river had flowed.
“It’s the biggest landslide in this area since the Wenchuan earthquake,” said Wang Yongbo, one of the officials in charge of rescue efforts, referring to the disaster that killed 87,000 people in 2008 in a town in Sichuan.
Authorities said the landslide was caused by torrential rain, and the cascading debris of mud and rocks blocked a 2-kilometer stretch of a river and a 1.6-kilometer section of a road, according to local officials.
Landslides are a frequent danger in rural and mountainous parts of China, particularly after heavy rains. | via voanews