At least 8,500 killed in China earthquake

A earthquake measuring 7.8 on the Richter scale rocked China from mountains to coast today, knocking down schools, homes and factories and killing at least 8,500 people.

The quake was centered in western China’s Sichuan province, but was so powerful that it was felt over thousands of miles from Beijing to Bangkok. It forced the evacuation of China’s tallest building, Shanghai’s Jinmao Tower, and sent high-rise workers around the country scurrying for safety.

China instituted tight controls on the information, setting up checkpoints to bar Chinese and foreign correspondents from most severely affected areas.

Many of the dead were reported to be children. The New China News Agency reported that at least eight schools had collapsed, one of them a high school where, as of last night, workers were trying to rescue 900 teenagers trapped under the rubble.

The news agency said 8,533 people were killed in Sichuan alone.

The quake was recorded at 2.28 p.m. with an epicenter in Wenchuan county, about 60 miles to the northwest of Chengdu, Sichuan’s capital. The area is best-known for the Wolong Nature Reserve, the largest breeding ground of captive pandas. The area has a large Tibetan population and was the scene of anti-Chinese protests over the last two months.

Sichuan officials said that in hard-hit Beichuan county, 80% of the buildings were reported to have collapsed. Deaths were also reported in Gansu and Yunnan provinces and in the city of Chongqing, hundreds of miles from the epicenter. At least four of the dead there as well were schoolchildren.

Liu Zhao, 22, a student, said he was home in a third-floor apartment in a high-rise building in central Chongqing when the quake struck.

“Lots of people were running; the whole community was terrified,” Liu said. “People were very scared, you could tell the way people were acting. All communications were cut or overloaded almost immediately with everyone busy trying to make calls.”

Zhao Cunfu, a teacher at the Lirang Village Elementary School in Chongqing, said by telephone that he was sitting in his office when he suddenly felt dizzy. Stumbling into the hallway, he realized what was happening and tried to escort out of the building a crowd of first-graders.

“The children panicked. They were pushing one another. They were very small. It was easy for them to get hurt,” Zhao said.

In Chengdu, a city of 11 million, witnesses described a mass panic as the quake hit.

“Cars were bouncing along the street. Everyone came rushing out of their buildings,” said Chris Fay, a British bar owner in a telephone interview over the howl of sirens in the background.

“It lasted a long time, maybe four or five minutes,” said Daisy Cang, a bookstore employee in Chengdu, who said she was alerted to the quake when the beer cans stacked in her refrigerator toppled over.

Fearful of aftershocks, most residents poured in the streets afterward. Chinese state television showed footage of office workers with their laptops in at an outdoor cafe, while others lounged around the flower beds, appearing to enjoy a rare break on a spring day.

But the television showed none of the more gruesome scenes from the earthquake and glimpses of the devastation came only from short items offered by the official news agencies.

It was reported that a chemical plant collapsed in Shifang, to the northeast of the epicenter, spilling 80 tons of toxic liquid ammonia. Hundreds of people were said to be trapped in the rubble.

In Dujiangyan City, where 900 students were trapped inside the remains of their junior high school, the Xinhua news agency described the parents standing around in horror as construction cranes picked through the rubble looking for survivors.

“Some had jumped out of the window and a few others ran down the stairs that did not collapse,” a volunteer rescue worker, Gao Shangyuan, was quoted telling Xinhua.

It has been difficult to get information from the epicenter of the earthquake because mountain roads were damaged and telephone lines severed. Deng Changwen, vice director of the Sichuan bureau of telecommunications, told Chinese television there had been a “total failure” of the communications network.

Premier Wen Jiabao was flying out to the area. About 5,000 troops and a 180-person team from the national earthquake center had also been dispatched.

There are already large number of troops from the Peoples’ Armed Police, a paramilitary force, deployed in the area as a result of the anti-Chinese protests in March.

The epicenter was in part of what is called the Tibetan-Qiang Autonomous Prefecture. The small town of Aba within the prefecture in particular has been a hotbed of unrest with Buddhist monks marching against Chinese rule since mid-March.

 mark.magnier@latimes.com

 barbara.demick@latimes.com

Wu Yixiu of The Times’ Beijing bureau contributed to this report.