Horror landslide 140 missing as Chinese village is swept away
MORE THAN 140 people are feared missing after a catastrophic landslide buried their homes in south-western China early on Saturday morning.
The landslide, which happened at 6am local time, was caused by the collapse of a mountain destroying a cluster of 62 homes and a hotel in the village of Xinmo in Mao County.
Five were confirmed dead after their bodies were found.
However, rescuers, who have been told by the country’s president Xi Jinping to “spare no effort” in the ongoing rescue attempts, pulled three people from the wreckage, two of whom survived.
Another couple and their month-old baby managed to escape just as the massive landslide started to hit their house.
Qiao Dashuai told local media that he and his wife were woken up by the child’s crying and when they came to the door, alerted to the noise of the landslide, they were swept away by water.
“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.”
The family was rescued and taken to hospital after teams of workers used ropes to move large rocks so they could reach them.
However, Dashuai’s parents and other relatives were still missing.
A number of search and rescue teams, involving more than 400 work- ers and police wearing bright orange uniforms and assisted by sniffer dogs, earth movers and excavators, also made contact with a villager buried under the rubble who answered her mobile phone, according to local paper the Sichuan Daily.
Yesterday, rescuers were still trying to reach her and others.
CCTV showed them using diggers and ropes in an attempt to dislodge large rocks as sustained attempts to pull people from the incident scene continued.
“It’s the biggest landslide to hit this area since the Wenchuan earthquake,” said Wang Yongbo, an official leading one of the rescue efforts, referring to China’s deadliest earthquake of the 21st century, which struck Sichuan province in May 2008, killing nearly 90,000 people.
Landslides are a regular danger in mountainous regions of China, especially during heavy rains, which experts claimed had probably triggered the latest disaster.
The provincial government said that an estimated eight million cubic metres of earth and rock – the equivalent to more than 3,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools – had slid down the mountain.
The county is home to an estiamted 110,000 people and the devastated village of Xinmo is known locally for tourism.
It is still unclear if visitors to the area were among the missing.