Hundreds of rescuers in southwest China struggled in treacherous conditions yesterday to pull out 107 people buried in a landslide, but said there was only a “slim” chance of finding survivors.
About 600 rescuers were searching through the mud and debris for signs of life in Dazhai village in Guizhou Province, local government spokeswoman Pi Yingfang said, a day after the landslide.
“The rescue is under way but it’s still raining hard and the local terrain is complex, which is affecting the rescue process,” said Pi, who represents the authorities in Guanling County.
State television showed rescuers walking on a wide, thick trail of mud that appeared to have almost entirely covered houses in its wake, and diggers had arrived at the scene to begin sifting through the dirt and rocks.
More than 100,000 cubic meters of mud and rocks, the equivalent of 40 Olympic-size swimming pools, had fallen on the houses, the official People’s Daily newspaper said.
The landslide was the latest weather-related disaster to hit China, which has suffered from floods and landslides for more than two weeks since summer downpours have pounded parts of the nation’s south, east and center.
So far this month, at least 235 people have died and more than 100 have gone missing in rain-related accidents, according to China’s civil affairs ministry.
Millions more have had to flee their homes and authorities said on Sunday that nearly 69 million people had been affected.
The local rescue headquarters in Guanling said the victims had a “slim” chance of survival, Xinhua news agency reported.
Villager Cen Chaoyang said he had managed to escape his house when he heard the landslide.
“I called for the others to flee, but it was too late. I saw some people behind me being buried,” he was quoted as saying by Xinhua.
Rescuers had to run 5km to reach the site, which was initially inaccessible by car, and were forced to halt the search late on Monday over fears of more landslides, the official China Daily newspaper said.
The National Meteorological Center said authorities needed to strengthen inspections of areas where geological disasters could occur in China’s rain-soaked south to prevent similar deadly accidents from happening.
This year’s floods are among the worst in the southern part of the country since 1998, when more than 3,600 people were killed and over 20 million displaced, Xinhua said.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
STOPOVERS: As organized crime groups in Asia and the Americas move drugs via places such as Tonga, methamphetamine use has reached levels called ‘epidemic’ A surge of drugs is engulfing the South Pacific as cartels and triads use far-flung island nations to channel narcotics across the globe, top police and UN officials told reporters. Pacific island nations such as Fiji and Tonga sit at the crossroads of largely unpatrolled ocean trafficking routes used to shift cocaine from Latin America, and methamphetamine and opioids from Asia. This illicit cargo is increasingly spilling over into local hands, feeding drug addiction in communities where serious crime had been rare. “We’re a victim of our geographical location. An ideal transit point for vessels crossing the Pacific,” Tonga Police Commissioner Shane McLennan
RSS