Quake in Southwestern China Reportedly Kills 150, Hurts 500

A powerful earthquake struck a city in southwestern China, killing 150 people and injuring more than 500 others, authorities said today.

China’s Central Seismology Bureau said the quake had a preliminary magnitude of 7.0. The U.S. Geological Survey reported 6.4. A magnitude-6 quake can cause severe damage; magnitude 7 is considered a major quake, capable of causing widespread heavy damage.

The earthquake hit at 7:14 p.m. Saturday near Lijiang, a county seat and scenic area in Yunnan province about 1,300 miles southwest of Beijing.

The seismology bureau in Beijing put a preliminary death toll at 150 but said it had no other details because contact with the isolated region was poor. The number of injured was likely to exceed 500, bureau spokesman Xu Wei said.

The region around Lijiang is populated mostly by the Naxi minority. The worst-hit areas have a population of about 1.5 million.

At one Lijiang farm alone, 29 people were killed, the official New China News Agency said, quoting an initial tally.

“People are too scared to go back home,” an official of the county government in Lijiang told the Reuters news agency, adding that many more residents had been left homeless by the earthquake, the worst to hit the region for years.

Rescuers worked through the night in a three-county area hit by the temblor, the New China News Agency said.

Teams of hundreds of troops and doctors were picking through the rubble of collapsed mud-brick houses in villages and suburbs in the hills and mountains for survivors, the county official said.

Most of the dead and injured were crushed when their fragile mud-brick homes collapsed, he said.

About one in 10 homes in Lijiang were destroyed, and many newer ones were damaged, the New China News Agency said. Water and electricity were knocked out.

The news agency said the quake cut communications to Zhongdian, the capital of an autonomous region in Yunnan for ethnic Tibetans.

Lijiang county, near the northwest corner of Yunnan, is an isolated area of rugged mountains and steep river valleys. The region is famous for its wide range of plants and animals.

The most recent major tremor to hit Yunnan was an earthquake of magnitude 6.5 that rocked an area near the provincial capital, Kunming, in October. Forty-four people were killed, 237 injured and 20,000 left homeless.