Monday, April 19, 2010
Friday, April 16, 2010
CHINA: Researchers: No Evidence Linking China Quakes
April 16, 2010
Disastrous China Earthquake Not Related to 2008 Sichuan Quake, Geologists Say
(Discover) A magnitude 6.9 earthquake struck China’s southern Qinghai Province this week. The death toll now stand at more than 600, and rescuers pulled more than 1,000 people from the rubble alive. But, geologists say, this quake doesn’t seem linked to the massive one that shook the nearby province of Sichuan two years ago.
"It’s not the same fault, it’s a consequence of the same bit of global tectonics, which is the collision of India with Asia. That’s the only link I’d make," said Dr David Rothery.
The May 2008 Sichuan earthquake resulted from a thrust fault, which happens frequently in the region near the Himalayas where India and Asia collided long ago. But although this week’s quake happened not far from there, Rothery says it was a strike-slip event, which happens when there is sideways movement along a fault line. That’s the type of event that caused the January earthquake in Haiti.
The results have been devastating in the rural region of Qinghai. As many as 70 Buddhist monks were reported dead in the collapse of one monastery, Thrangu, about six miles outside of Jiegu. Some of the worst casualties occurred at local schools, where Xinhua reported at least 66 students and 10 teachers dead, including 32 at an elementary school and 22, 20 of them girls, at Yushu Vocational School.
As in Haiti, poorly built structures worsened the death toll. And rescuers continue to be hampered by a number of difficulties: Qinghai is difficult to reach, cold, and at an altitude of approximately 13,000 feet.
With so much shaking going on in 2010-including major earthquakes already in Haiti, Chile, Japan, and elsewhere-the question on many minds is whether the planet is becoming more prone to earthquakes. For geologists, a few months are less than the blink of an eye compared to the timescales with which they work. But, they say, there is natural variation in seismic activity.
“Relative to the 20-year period from the mid-1970’s to the mid 1990’s, the Earth has been more active over the past 15 or so years,” said Stephen S. Gao, a geophysicist at Missouri University of Science & Technology. “We still do not know the reason for this yet.”
2010’s quakes aren’t “unusual” activity, the U.S. Geological Survey says. But, they have been so clustered and so deadly that they’ve created the unshakable impression of an increasingly-shaky planet. What happens is when a lot of people get killed there’s a lot of reporting of it, and if an equally big event occurs somewhere out in the middle of nowhere it doesn’t attract the attention,” said G. Randy Keller, professor of geophysics at the University of Oklahoma.
CHINA: China quake toll 'passes 1,000'
The number of people known to have been killed by a massive quake in China's Qinghai province has risen to 1,144, officials say.
Another 417 are still missing in the remote mountainous region and 11,744 have been injured, a rescue spokesman told the Xinhua news agency.
Thousands have been left homeless, with many having to sleep outdoors in freezing temperatures.
Premier Wen Jiabao has promised "all-out effort" to rebuild the area.
Heavy lifting equipment began arriving on Friday in the remote Himalayan region by road from hundreds of kilometres away.
Food, tents and medical supplies are arriving too but rescue workers say there is a critical need for further supplies.
An estimated 15,000 houses have been destroyed in Yushu county, leaving thousands of people homeless people and casualties waiting for help.
Rescue joy
Soldiers, civilian rescue workers and Buddhist monks have been using pickaxes, shovels and their bare hands to pick through the rubble for survivors.
"For us monks, the most important thing is life," said Danchujiasi, a monk who travelled to the scene from neighbouring Sichuan province.
"We have come here to help rescue people. So many people have died, and we want to save the ones still living."
A teacher at a school in Yushu county said he and other staff members had been digging students out of the rubble with their bare hands.
"We didn't have any kind of tools. We couldn't lift the bigger rocks so we found some ropes and pulled them," Chen Guangming told the Associated Press news agency.
"This way we were able to pull out five. Three of them are still alive."
Tens of thousands of people were injured in the quake, and one doctor in Jiegu said he had lost track of how many people he had treated.
"They just keep coming one after the other," said Myima Jiaba, working at a makeshift hospital in the town's sports stadium.
"Right now, what we need is a lot of medicine. We need antiseptics and antibiotics. And overall, we need more tents and food, and sanitation."
Power down
The monks have also been helping to collect bodies and prepare them for funerals.
At a foothill under the main monastery of Jiegu township, monks chanted Tibetan Buddhist mantras in front of piles of dead, Reuters news agency said.
"I'd say we've collected a thousand or more bodies here," said Lopu, a monk.
"Many of the bodies you see here don't have families or their families haven't come looking for them, so it's our job to take good care of them."
Rescuers in Yushu, which lies at about 4,000m (13,000ft), are facing freezing weather and high altitude.
Ninety-seven percent of Yushu's population is ethnic Tibetan, and state media said that 500 interpreters were being sent to aid rescuers.
The quake, which struck on Wednesday morning at the shallow depth of 10km (six miles), knocked out phone and power lines, and triggered landslides, blocking vital roads.
Premier Wen Jiabao visited the affected area on Thursday and Friday, promising "all-out efforts" to rebuild the devastated region.
He said the people would "overcome the disaster and improve national unity in fighting the calamity".
CHINA: China Quake Toll Nears 800 Amid Hunt For Survivors
by NPR Staff and Wires
Tibetan monks prayed over hundreds of bodies Friday at a makeshift morgue next to their monastery after powerful earthquakes destroyed the remote mountain town of Jiegu in western China and left at least 791 people dead.
The official toll was likely to climb further. Gerlai Tenzing, a red-robed monk from the Jiegu Monastery, estimated that about 1,000 bodies had been brought to a hillside clearing in the shadow of the monastery. He said a precise count was difficult because bodies continued to trickle in and some had already been taken away by family members.
Alyson Hurt/NPR
As he spoke, three monks and two other men awkwardly loaded two cloth-wrapped corpses into the trunk of a taxi. Nearby, other monks took pictures of bodies and rewrapped them, pinning numbers to each. Others recited prayers as yak-butter candles flickered nearby.
Relief workers estimate that 70 percent to 90 percent of the town of wood-and-mud houses collapsed when the earthquakes hit Yushu county Wednesday morning.
NPR's Anthony Kuhn reported from one of the hardest-hit towns that rescue workers were desperately trying to dig out survivors from the ruins of a collapsed hotel.
"They went at the crumbled hotel first with an excavator, then with shovels, then with hands. Some people were pulled out -- some dead, some alive," Kuhn said.
China Central Television reported that a 13-year-old Tibetan girl was pulled from the toppled two-story Minzhu Hotel on Friday after a sniffer dog alerted rescuers to her location. The girl, identified as Changli Maomu, was freed after a crane lifted a large concrete block out of the rubble, it said. Her condition was good and she was taken to a medical station for treatment, it said.
The official Xinhua News Agency reported Friday afternoon the confirmed death toll had risen to 791, with 294 missing. The report said 11,477 people were injured, 1,174 severely. The strongest of the quakes Wednesday was measured at magnitude 6.9 by the U.S. Geological Survey and 7.1 by China's earthquake administration.
Kuhn said that because the area affected by the quake is relatively small, workers have been able to get heavy machinery, troops and rescue teams in place fairly quickly. But he said altitude in the remote mountain region was making search and rescue efforts more difficult.
"This town is almost 2 miles above sea level and so the oxygen is considerably thinner," he said.
Kuhn also noted that the large population of ethnic Tibetans and the numbers of Tibetan Buddhist monks assisting rescuers adds a politically sensitive edge to the government's aid efforts.
"The government is used to taking the lead and not letting civil society take the lead," Kuhn said. "Another thing they have to watch out for of course is burial practices. The government is burying a lot of the dead who are ethnic Tibetans, and it has to be careful that it doesn't offend them by not respecting their practices.”
To underline official concern for a Tibetan area that saw anti-government protests two years ago, Premier Wen Jiabao arrived in Yushu county Thursday evening to meet survivors. President Hu Jintao, in Brazil after visiting Washington, canceled scheduled stops in Venezuela and Peru to come home.
Wen, the sympathetic, grandfatherly face of the usually distant Chinese leadership, sought to provide comfort and build trust with the mostly Tibetan victims of the quake.
"The disaster you suffered is our disaster. Your suffering is our suffering. Your loss of loved ones is our loss. We mourn as you do. It breaks our hearts," Wen said in remarks repeatedly broadcast on state TV.
Standing atop a pile of rubble clutching a wireless microphone, Wen also repeated nearly word for word the promise he made during the Sichuan earthquake:
"As long as there's a glimmer of hope, we will spare no effort and never give up."
Many survivors shivered through a second night outdoors as they waited for tents to arrive. Hundreds gathered on a plaza around a 50-foot tall statue of the mythical Tibetan King Gesar, wrapped in blankets taken from shattered homes.
Smoke rose from charcoal stoves dotting the plaza as some families brewed salty black tea, a Tibetan staple, and ate flat bread and fried noodles. Others complained there wasn't enough to eat and asked reporters to help them get food.
People with broken arms or legs cried in pain as medical teams could offer little more than injections. A doctor at the Qinghai provincial hospital, where the severely injured were being flown, said she had no idea how many were being treated because there was no time to count them all.
China Central Television reported that about 40,000 tents would be in place by Saturday, enough to accommodate all survivors. Also on the way was more equipment to help probe for signs of life under the debris, it said. The tools include small cameras and microphones attached to poles that can be snaked into crevices as well as heat and motion sensors.
Rescuers continued to probe the rubble for sounds or movement in a rush to find anyone buried alive more than 48 hours after the quakes hit.
At one collapsed building where people were believed trapped, about 70 civilians, including three dozen Tibetan monks in crimson robes, joined rescue workers.
"One, two, three," the monks chanted as they used wooden beams to try to push away a section of collapsed wall. They later tied ropes to a slab of concrete and dragged it away.
Xinhua quoted a local education official as saying 66 children and 10 teachers had died, mostly in three schools, but more remained missing.
Xu Lai, a spokesman for the Qinghai-based educational group Gesanghua, said the first and third grade classrooms at the Yushu No. 3 Wanquan Elementary School crumbled because they were built with mud, instead of brick and cement. Xu was not sure how many bodies or survivors had been recovered at the school.
Thogong Golma, an employee at the Children's Home of Hope for orphans, said the bodies of eight orphans had been found by Friday but 25 remained missing, including many who attended classes at the No. 3 Wanquan school.
"When we arrived at the No. 3 Wanquan Elementary School, the place had already been cleared, and the bodies had been pulled out and taken away," Thogong Golma said. "Right now, we are only looking around the town, asking everyone on the streets if they saw those missing children."
Thousands of students died during a massive Sichuan quake in 2008 when their poorly built schools collapsed. But unlike in Sichuan -- where schools toppled as other buildings stood -- nearly everything fell over in Yushu.
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