China Mobilizes Quake Rescue

Chinese authorities launched a massive rescue campaign Monday to locate and aid survivors of the largest earthquake to hit western China in more than half a century.

At least 261 people were killed in the quake in the Xinjiang region, with 2,050 seriously injured, officials said this morning. Local officials told state media that precise figures were hard to compile and that the toll could rise.

Police and 5,000 troops and reservists rushed to the scene, where they dug injured residents out of their collapsed homes using search dogs, motion detectors, pickaxes and their bare hands, the official New China News Agency reported.

Shi Dagang, Communist Party secretary in the Kashgar region, told the news agency that the hardest part of the relief efforts was “maintaining order in burying the dead.” About 90% of the stricken area’s residents are Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking minority whose Muslim faith requires prompt burial of the deceased.

The government put the quake’s magnitude at 6.8, while the U.S. Geological Survey in Golden, Colo., said it was 6.4. In either case, it was the most serious to hit the region in over 50 years. It struck at 10:03 a.m., when many residents were still at home. Despite its huge area, China operates on one time zone, so in western regions, the sun rises and sets late in the day.

The quake’s epicenter was between Bachu and Jiashi counties in the southern foothills of the Tian Shan mountains bordering Kyrgyzstan. State media said most of the casualties were limited to several towns in Bachu. The seats of both counties were important stops on the Silk Road.

State media reported that the quake destroyed 8,861 homes and 900 school buildings. By this morning, aftershocks with magnitudes up to 5.0 shook the area, but no further casualties were reported.

About 6,000 tents shipped to the stricken counties by the Civil Affairs Ministry are to arrive today, and thousands of tents and blankets have been sent from the regional capital, Urumqi. Afraid of returning to unsafe homes, approximately 30,000 residents remained outside in near-freezing temperatures, state media said.

Hospitals in Kashgar, which was also jolted by the quake, treated many of the injured.

The Xinjiang or “new border” area is a huge swath of territory bordering Central Asia. Its vast desert basins and snow-capped peaks are the prone to frequent seismic activity, although the area -- home to about 20 million people -- is sparsely populated.

Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Hu Jintao, Premier Zhu Rongji and Vice Premier Wen Jiabao instructed local authorities to adopt “a spirit of extreme responsibility to the people” in meeting the basic needs of the survivors.

China’s worst earthquake struck near Beijing in 1976, when a quake of magnitude 7.9 flattened the industrial center of Tangshan, killing at least 250,000 people.