Quake in Southwestern China Kills at Least 210, Injures 3,700

A powerful earthquake ravaged a mountain city in southwestern China, killing at least 210 people and injuring 3,700 others, authorities said today.

The magnitude-7.0 earthquake in Yunnan province struck at 7:14 p.m. Saturday near Lijiang, a tourist area about 1,300 miles southwest of Beijing, the Central Seismology Bureau said.

As of noon local time today, 210 people were known dead, said Chen Jie of the provincial government office. The state-run New China News Agency said 3,700 were seriously injured.

The extent of the disaster wasn’t immediately clear. Wang Ze, also of the provincial government, said rescuers searched for victims throughout the night. The provincial vice governor went to the area today to investigate.

There were no reports of foreign tourists killed or injured, Wang said. Guests at the hotel in Lijiang were moved into tents to guard against aftershocks, he said.

The airport in Lijiang remained open. Officials planned to evacuate some of the seriously injured people to hospitals in Kunming, the provincial capital, a 35-minute flight, Wang said.

The area in northwestern Yunnan is not heavily populated, but the earthquake’s destruction covered parts of three counties--Lijiang, Zhongdian and Heqing--the news agency said.

Water and electricity were knocked out, and communication was cut off from Zhongdian city, the center of an autonomous region of ethnic Tibetans, the news agency reported.

At one Lijiang farm alone, 29 people were killed, the 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 in years.

The hardest-hit area, Lijiang County, is about 85 miles east of the border with Myanmar.

Lijiang is the capital of the Naxi, a local ethnic minority of 275,000 people.

A magnitude-6.5 quake hit an area near Kunming in October, killing 51 people and injuring more than 800.

That temblor seriously damaged almost 200,000 buildings.

A magnitude-6 quake can cause severe damage, and magnitude 7 is considered a major quake, capable of causing widespread heavy damage.