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China was last night facing the fallout from its worst natural disaster in three decades with at least 9,000 people known to have been killed in a massive earthquake that struck the mountainous province of Sichuan. Tens of thousands more people are feared dead or trapped in the rubble with 80 per cent of buildings reportedly razed to the ground in many areas by a quake that registered 7.8 on the Richter scale. Hundreds of students are among those buried alive as the tremors struck in the middle of the school day with 900 teenagers trapped in the rubble of a single collapsed school in the Sichuan town of Dujiangyan. A massive relief effort was under way last night with 9,000 soldiers dispatched to the disaster area but rescuers were still cut off from the epicentre in Wenchuan, a county of 112,000 people about 62 miles from the Sichuan provincial capital Chengdu. The death toll was expected to rise sharply when emergency services arrive to assess the damage.The worst-affected areas were four counties including Wenchuan. Landslides left the roads impassable, causing the government to order soldiers into the area on foot, while heavy rains prevented four military helicopters from landing.Parents watched as rescuers battled in the mud and rubble to free hundreds of children from a collapsed three-storey school building in Dujiangyan. Villagers helped dozens of students out of the dirt while mechanical diggers worked. Local media showed footage of weeping relatives and shocked victims reeling from the earthquake."Some buried teenagers were struggling to break loose from underneath the ruins while others were crying out for help," the Xinhua news agency reported. At least 50 bodies had been recovered from the school. Two girls who escaped said they had been able to do so as they had "run faster" than their classmates. At least another eight schools at least were reported destroyed.The testimony of Richard Morgan-Sanjurjo, a 30-year-old business consultant in Chengdu, was typical of the witness reports from the initial tremors. "I heard the vents ruffling and then started to feel the building shake and a couple of bits of the ceiling fell," he told AFP. "I ran so fast. I thought the building was going to come down on my head."The geography of the region is mountainous, bordering the Himalayas and Tibet, with thousands of remote villages near the epicentre joined by mountain passes and high roads, which means getting to many of the victims could take a long time. Witnesses said many thousands of people were stranded as roads were destroyed.The Sichuan plain is one of China's most fertile areas, but it relies heavily on an irrigation system linked to the 2,000-year-old Dujiangyan flood control works – which means the quake could exacerbate inflation, already running at the fastest pace in 12 years. There were fears that China's programme to save the endangered giant panda may have been affected. Wenchuan county is home to the Wolong nature reserve, the country's leading research and breeding base for pandas – but the centre could not be reached by telephone.The quake was so powerful it shook buildings in the capital Beijing and the financial centre Shanghai hundreds of miles away, and tremors were felt in Thailand, Vietnam and Pakistan. The earthquake is the worst to hit China in 32 years since the 1976 Tangshan earthquake in north-eastern China where up to 300,000 people died.A senior rescue worker Li Zaiyuan told Chinese television it would take many hours to get through to Wenchuan county. He was speaking in Aba county, a Tibetan region of Sichuan, which witnessed serious unrest during protests in March. Thousands of army troops and paramilitary People's Armed Police officers carrying medical supplies were also headed to the region. Heavy rain drove back four military helicopters heading to the earthquake centre and was continuing to block rescue efforts. Workers used cranes and diggers to clear the debris on the road leading to the city, much of it caused by landslides. "We are doing everything we can, but the roads are blanketed with rocks and boulders," saidLi Chongxi, a rescue worker.Hundreds were buried in a chemical plant in two collapsed chemical plants in Shifang in Sichuan. Some 80 tonnes of highly corrosive liquid ammonia had leaked when the plants were struck by the earthquake, forcing the evacuation of 6,000 people, according to the state news agency.Fears of fresh tremors or aftershocks were high, and driving through Sichuan and Chongqing, many cars were parked by the roadside as people slept in their vehicles, fearful of another earthquake.Deng Changwen, of the Sichuan Seismological Bureau, said efforts were under way to contain any potential follow-up damage from aftershocks. Another employee at the bureau said: "We were in quite a narrow street where everything just started shaking. All the alarms of the cars around went off, all the windows you heard smashing into each other. Entire buildings were being evacuated, people were panicking, especially since the phones didn't work. It was mayhem. Traffic got jammed, it was very surreal."Initial casualty reports began to trickle through early in the afternoon, with the figures low, but it was clear that a major humanitarian disaster was in the offing once the President Hu Jintao made a public appeal for everyone to rally behind the relief effort. The Prime Minister, Wen Jiabao, headed for the disaster zone. "Facing disaster, the most important thing is calm, confidence, courage and strong leadership," he told China's CCTV television on a plane to Chengdu to oversee rescue operations.Speaking to evacuees staying in tents in Dujiangyan, Mr Wen said: "There are still hopes of survival. And if there is only one shred of hope, we should make 100 per cent efforts, and we will not slacken."A history of huge tremors
*The earthquake that struck China yesterday brought with it echoes of the Tangshan disaster in 1976, believed to be the deadliest tremor of the 20th century. Then, just before dawn, it was the north-eastern city of Tangshan that felt the force of a quake of 7.8 in magnitude, the same as yesterday's tremor in Sichuan.Secretive and introverted – and in stark contrast to last night when the state news agency Xinhua was providing updates every half an hour – China tried to hide the death toll of the Tangshan quake for months and refused offers of international aid. Eventually, with evidence of structural damage even apparent in Beijing, a figure of at least 250,000 emerged, though experts suggest that as many as 700,000 may have died.Part of the attempted secrecy was to save face. That so many people were living in flimsy shacks and dormitories so vulnerable to the quake was in part a failing of the Cultural Revolution which, by then, was on its last legs. But it is believed that many of those who died yesterday will have perished in buildings that made no provision for earthquakes, the only real difference being that news of the deaths is emerging faster.Such vulnerability is arguably odd for a country that is no stranger to massive earthquakes and was the victim of the worst tremor in recorded history, in what is now Shaanxi province on 23 January, 1556 with an estimated magnitude of 8.0 and death toll of 830,000. Yesterday, Wen Jiabao, the country's premier, was quick to visit to the scene in an attempt to unite the country.
By Clifford Coonan in Chongqing, China
As in the days of Noah....
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