In addition to the deaths, injuries and hundreds of destroyed houses, the earthquake left a population exposed to the elements on a winter night with sub-zero temperatures that complicated the situation for the survivors. Many people did not return home out of fear, after the nine aftershocks that followed the earth movement that claimed the lives of at least 126 people, while Xi Jinping's government asked local authorities for speed.
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A 6.2 magnitude earthquake surprised citizens of Jishisian district at midnight on Monday, November 18. Gansu and Qinghai provinces in China's mountainous northwest region reported massive damage, more than 730 injuries, and power and water supply problems.
Rescue teams continue operations this Tuesday amid collapsed buildings and landslides, a task that is increasingly complicated by low temperatures that have reached -15° Celsius.
In addition to the injured and 126 dead (most in Gansu and the rest in Qinghai), local media have reported 20 missing people, who are being searched with drones, excavators and bulldozers, in the middle of the complicated mountainous region.
The earthquake occurred at a relatively shallow depth of 10 kilometers in Gansu's Jishishan county, about five kilometers from the provincial border with Qinghai, according to information provided by the China Earthquake Network Center, while the China Geological Survey The United States measured the magnitude at 5.9.
As of 10 a.m. local time alone, nine aftershocks of magnitude 3.0 or higher had already been recorded, about 10 hours after the initial earthquake, the largest of them with a magnitude of 4.1, authorities said.
rescue efforts
“The 72 hours after an earthquake, when survivors are most likely to be rescued, could be shortened by bad weather, leaving trapped victims at greater risk,” the state news agency Xinhua said.
A group of doctors and more than 2,000 firefighters were sent by the Chinese Executive and the Ministry of Emergency Management, after they had decreed a level II response to the incident.
The armed forces also joined the rescue and assistance operations to which Beijing allocated $28 million.
With the group, 2,600 tents, 10,400 folding beds, 10,400 quilts and 1,000 sets of stoves arrived, in addition to the 111,500 relief items that had been allocated, as of Tuesday morning, for the affected people in the area.
“The State Council has sent a task force to the affected areas to help guide relief efforts. Gansu and Qinghai provinces have organized relief support with the immediate allocation of relief supplies such as camps and folding beds,” the state-run Xinhua agency published in Spanish.
A state-level task force was quickly dispatched to the region hit by a #earthquake in the province of #Gansuin the northwest of #China to support and supervise the work of epidemiological control and disinfection, announced the National Administration of Control and… pic.twitter.com/uH5AlWncIX
— China Xinhua Spanish (@XHespanol) December 19, 2023
Buildings with low seismic resistance
Although earthquakes are somewhat common in the mountainous area of western China that rises to form the eastern edge of the Tibetan plateau, near the place where the Asian and Indian tectonic plates collide in the Himalayas, the truth is that it is a region with little solidity in the construction of its buildings to face earthquakes.
The local newspaper 'Global Times' assured that the number of victims, in part, was due to the poor resistance of the buildings in this region, a scenario that was complicated by the time at which the earth movement occurred, which left no capacity reaction to many people.
Some residents assured the local media 'The Paper' that many people were sleeping when the earthquake occurred, at the stroke of midnight, and that they did not have time to take shelter.
Li Haibing, an expert at the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences, said the relatively high number of casualties in the latest earthquake was partly because it was shallow. “Therefore, it has caused greater shaking and destruction, even though the magnitude was not great,” he said.
In September 2022, 93 people were killed in a 6.8 magnitude earthquake that shook southwestern China's Sichuan province, triggering landslides and shaking buildings in the provincial capital of Chengdu, where 21 million residents were under Covid-19 lockdown. 19.
However, the deadliest episodes occurred nine and 15 years ago, when in August 2014 the earthquake in the western province of Yunnan left 617 dead and before that, in 2008 in the province of Sichuan, 70,000 people died.
With AP and EFE
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