15 people found dead in landslide

118 others missing in Chinese village after homes buried

Emergency personnel work at the site of a landslide Saturday in the village of Xinmo in southwestern China.
Emergency personnel work at the site of a landslide Saturday in the village of Xinmo in southwestern China.

MAO COUNTY, China -- Crews searching through the night in the rubble left by a landslide that buried a mountain village under tons of soil and rocks in southwestern China found 15 bodies, but more than 100 more people remained missing.

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AP/Xinhua/HE QINGHAI

Rescue teams work at the scene of a landslide Saturday in the Tibetan plateau region of southwestern China, where more than 100 people were buried by dirt, debris and rocks. Officials said 15 bodies had been recovered from the rubble where 62 homes and a hotel once sat.

About 3,000 rescuers were using detection devices and dogs to look for signs of life in an area that once held 62 homes and a hotel, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.

The provincial government of Sichuan today released the names of the 118 missing people. It's unclear if the 15 bodies have been identified.

Relatives were sobbing as they awaited news of their loved ones. A woman in a nearby village said she had no information on her relatives in Xinmo, the mountain village that was buried. She said she had only heard that body parts were found.

Xu Zhiwen, executive deputy governor of the Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture of Aba, the region where the landslide struck early Saturday, said all 142 tourists who were visiting a site in Xinmo were found alive.

"It's the biggest landslide to hit this area since the Wenchuan earthquake," Wang Yongbo, an official leading one of the rescue efforts, told state broadcaster China Central Television. Wang was referring to China's deadliest earthquake this century, a magnitude 7.9 temblor that struck Sichuan province in May 2008, killing nearly 90,000 people.

The official Sichuan Daily newspaper said on its microblog that a family of three, including a month-old baby, managed to escape just as the landslide started to hit their house.

Qiao Dashuai told CCTV that the baby saved the family because he was woken up by the child's crying and was going to change the baby's diaper when he heard a noise that alerted him to the landslide.

"We heard a strange noise at the back of our house, and it was rather loud," Qiao said. "Wind was coming into the room so I wanted to close the door. When we came out, water flow swept us away instantly." He said they struggled against the flood of water until they met medical workers who took them to a hospital. Qiao said his parents and other relatives had not been found.

The landslide struck after a night of rain with no warning, and many residents were apparently sleeping or awakened too late by the roar of a falling hillside.

"The entire village was shattered," Deng Zusong, a 25-year-old resident of a nearby village, said in a telephone interview. "It was just like an earthquake."

Mao County, or Maoxian, sits on the eastern margin of the Tibetan plateau and is home to about 110,000 people, according to the government's website. Most residents are of the Qiang ethnic minority. The village is known locally for tourism, and Chinese reports said it was unclear if tourists were among those buried by the landslide.

The landslide blocked a 1.2-mile section of a river. The provincial government said on its website that an estimated 282 million cubic feet of earth and rock -- equivalent to more than 3,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools -- had slid down the mountain.

Experts told CCTV that the landslide was likely triggered by rain. A meteorologist interviewed by CCTV said there was light rain in the area that would continue for a few days.

The Sichuan Daily said rescuers made contact with a villager buried under the rubble who answered her cellphone when they called and burst into tears. The woman was in the bedroom of her home when the landslide hit the village, and rescuers were trying to reach her, the report said.

But as night came, the rescuers had little good news to share. The woman who answered the call appeared to have died, said Sichuan Online, a provincial news service.

CCTV showed footage of rescuers in bright orange uniforms using earth movers and excavators but also relying on ropes to pull at huge rocks and shovels to dig up the dirt.

Fearful of setting off another landslide, the rescuers could not dig deeply over a large area, Xinhua said. They also had a hard time moving the boulders that had crashed down onto the village.

"The chances of surviving being buried by a high-mountain collapse are very slim," said Xinhua, citing a geologist who was helping the rescuers.

In a statement, China's president, Xi Jinping, ordered the rescue efforts to continue at full intensity, and he told other areas of the country to be on guard for signs of danger during the rainy season.

Information for this article was contributed by Gillian Wong and Han Guan Ng of The Associated Press; and by Chris Buckley, Javier C. Hernandez and Iris Zhao of The New York Times.

A Section on 06/25/2017

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