Mudslides engulfed a town in northwest China yesterday, killing 127 people and leaving perhaps 2,000 residents missing as rescue teams dug through crushed homes and blasted away debris clogging a river valley.
The mudslides and flooding hit Zhouqu County in Gannan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in Gansu Province, an area dominated by steep and barren hills, after torrential rains late on Saturday, Xinhua news agency said, citing local officials.
Runoff from the downpour banked up behind a landslide in the narrow valley on the Bailong River near the main town in Zhouqu.
The clogged river coursing through the town triggered flooding and mudslides that struck there after midnight, smashed a small hydro station, and left at least 96 dead, Xinhua and Chinese television reported.
The disaster follows flooding in Pakistan that has killed more than 1,600 people and in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir. Flash floods have killed at least 132 people in the Himalayan region of Ladakh.
China’s death toll could rise sharply as Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao (溫家寶) headed to the scene.
More than 2,000 people were missing, one Xinhua report said, but later news reports said officials were still trying to arrive at an estimate of the missing.
Rescue officials told Chinese television the mud and wreckage made it impossible to use heavy machinery.
“Many single-story homes have been wiped out and now we’re waiting to see how many people got out,” one resident of Zhouqu, a merchant called Han Jiangping, told reporters by phone. “We’ve had landslides before, but never anything this bad. People are trying to find their families and waiting for more rescuers.”
At one point, the flooding covered about half of the Zhouqu County town, which has about 40,000 residents, and inundated a nearby village of 300 families, state media said. The flood water reached up to three stories high on some buildings.
About 2,800 troops and a hundred medical workers were sent to help, Xinhua said.
“Now the sludge has become the biggest problem to rescue operations. It’s too thick to walk or drive through,” said the head of the county, Diemujiangteng, according to Xinhua.
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