Death Toll Climbs In China’s Worst Earthquake In Nearly A Decade

(Bloomberg) -- The death toll from China’s worst earthquake since 2014 rose to more than 130 as the government sent a top official to oversee recovery efforts.

Some 113 people were killed in mostly rural areas of Gansu province and another 18 in neighboring Qinghai, state broadcaster China Central Television reported late Tuesday. More than 730 injuries have been reported.

China has sent Vice Premier Zhang Guoqing, a member of the Communist Party’s 24-member Politburo, to the area struck by a magnitude 6.2 quake late Monday. Zhang, head of the nation’s disaster relief commission, is making the visit after Chinese leader Xi Jinping called for efforts to minimize casualties from the disaster.

Videos and pictures on China’s social media show brick homes turned to rubble and sections of roads crumpled. Others show food kitchens and tents set up after an estimated 155,000 homes in Gansu province were damaged.

Four-fifths of homes in one Gansu village were uninhabitable, the official Xinhua News Agency reported, citing a local official.

The quake hit as northern China deals with a cold snap. The temperatures in Jishishan county, the epicenter of the quake, slid to as low as minus 16 degrees Celsius on Tuesday.

Rural Jishishan is about 90 kilometers (55 miles) southwest of Lanzhou, the capital of Gansu. That province had one of China’s smallest economies in 2022.

There are signs that recovery efforts are making progress, with state media saying damaged power lines are again operational and rural roads have reopened.

Western China is prone to earthquakes, some of them very deadly. A quake in Yunnan in 2014 killed more than 600, and another in Sichuan in 2008 left nearly 90,000 dead.

--With assistance from Jing Li.

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