BEIJING – Rescuers pulled three people alive from rubble yesterday, five days after an earthquake killed nearly 2,000 people in a Tibetan region of western China.
China Central Television (CCTV) said a four-year-old girl and an elderly woman had been trapped since Wednesday under a bed in a collapsed mud house in a village about 13 miles from the hardest-hit town of Jiegu, until rescuers dug them out this morning.
Relatives kept Wujian Cuomao (68) and Cairen Baji alive by sending them food and water through gaps in the rubble with the help of bamboo poles, state broadcaster CCTV said.
Also yesterday, rescuers freed a Tibetan woman named Ritu from her toppled house on a hillside, CCTV said. Half her body had been trapped by the debris, the report said, but her vital signs were stable.
The death toll from the quake in Qinghai province climbed to 1,944, the official Xinhua News Agency said. More than 12,100 were injured.
In Jiegu, thousands of Tibetan Buddhist monks picked at rubble with shovels, performing funeral rites and throwing food to survivors from the back of trucks.
Most of the work in town, however, has shifted from rescue to rebuilding. At a supply depot set up on the town’s edge, huge stacks of bottled water were piled up outside a warehouse. More relief goods rumbled past mountainside hamlets where residents pitched government-provided tents along a two-lane highway that is the only connection between Jiegu and the provincial capital of Xining, the nearest big city. – (PA)