‘No signs of life’ after huge landslide smothers ‘shattered’ Chinese village
BEIJING — Hundreds of rescuers tapped, poked and dug through the earth and rubble left by a landslide that smothered a village in southwestern China on Saturday, looking for signs of survivors among the 100 or more people who were missing. But as night fell and the search continued under lights, hopes of pulling many alive from the rocks and earth dimmed.
“Currently, there are no signs of life,” the search operation reported, according to Xinhua, the official news agency.
The village, Xinmo, in Mao County, Sichuan province, lies in a region of brittle, unstable mountains vulnerable to landslides and tremors. But the landslide struck around 5:40 a.m. after a night of rain with no warning, and many residents of the 62 or so homes in the village 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 by telephone. “It was just like an earthquake.”
Nearly 2,000 rescuers and members of support teams had converged on Xinmo by Saturday afternoon, news reports said. Initially there were bulletins of a survivor who yelled from under the debris and another who answered a telephone call.
But as night came, the rescuers had little good news. The woman who answered the call appeared to have died, said Sichuan Online, a news service. By late in the day, officials said that searchers had found 15 bodies and estimated that 118 people were missing.
“The chances of surviving being buried by a highmountain collapse are very slim,” Xinhua said. “The area for rescue work is narrow, and it will be difficult to expand rescue forces to a large scale.”
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.