BY NBC NEWS
China’s Yangwa Surrounded by devastation, the surviving family members of an earthquake victim wept on Wednesday in makeshift shelters among bitter cold temperatures in the northwest Chinese highlands.
A Monday night earthquake that left over 900 people injured and at least 131 dead caused houses to collapse and cave in, according to accounts from Chinese media. The majority of the deaths occurred in Gansu province, with the remaining number occurring in Qinghai, a nearby province.
Ma Lianqiang stood beside his wife’s body, covered in blankets, under a makeshift tent illuminated by a lone overhead light in the predawn darkness. When his wife went to her mother’s house to stay because she was sick, she was struck and buried by falling debris.
In Yangwa, a village in Gansu province, Ma and other members of his extended family managed to survive despite significant damage to their home. His father extricated Ma’s son from the debris, and his back hurt. According to his uncle, the home began to collapse as soon as they heard the earthquake.
According to Ma Chengming, the uncle, “we crawled out in fear.”
At a press briefing on Wednesday, a province official stated that some 80,000 people had been resettled in Gansu. As the temperature dropped well below freezing, many people spent the night in relief tents that had been brought to the region.
According to state media, rescuers in Qinghai, to the north, were hunting for 16 people who went missing in a region where landslides had smashed into homes. It was less than 20 on Tuesday. The number of fatalities in the province increased by four to eighteen; however, it was not immediately clear if the four people who had vanished from the landslides had actually been found dead.
At the press conference, authorities in Gansu stated that by Tuesday mid-afternoon, the search and rescue operation had mostly been finished. The province saw a rise in injuries to 782, but the death toll stayed at 113. Added to the 198 injuries in Qinghai, that made the total number of injuries nearly 1,000.
