Elderly woman's survival raises hopes as 1,200 remain missing
An elderly woman was pulled alive from a collapsed building in Zhouqu, Gansu , after being trapped for 34 hours - sparking hope there may be other survivors among the 1,200 or so still missing following massive mudslides.
The 74-year-old woman, who was not named by state media, was reported to be in stable condition and able to talk, but suffering from hunger and dehydration.
Footage broadcast on China Central Television showed rescuers crawling through a hole punched through the base of a brick wall to free the woman from a cavity where she had been trapped for a day and a half.
The thin and frail-looking woman, dressed in traditional Tibetan clothes, was lifted out of the rubble of the half-buried building's ground floor late yesterday morning and carried away by stretcher.
Her story was one of the few rays of hope in a frustrating day that saw thousands of soldiers and other rescue workers digging beside locals in the hope of freeing more survivors.
Most of the work was being carried out by hand due to the difficulties in getting mechanical digging equipment into the affected areas.
Local authorities said yesterday they had rescued 77 people from buildings that had collapsed or been swamped by mud. But the bodies of the dead outnumbered the living and by evening the chances of more rescues were fading fast.
One survivor interviewed by Gansu Television wept as he described the frustration of digging through the rubble in search of his relatives.
The massive mudslide had submerged three storeys of the block. 'This used to be my home. My wife and child are both inside,' he said. 'We were on the first floor. My brothers had the ground floor and there were two people buried in there.
'More than 10 people have died from our family alone, all buried in this building ... There is just my father, mother and me left.'
However, the elderly woman's survival did boost the spirits of some. Xu Tenphel, 45, told Xinhua he was refusing to give up hope of finding his mother in the ruins of her home in Beijie village, just outside Zhouqu. 'I'll stay here until her body is found,' he said. Xu had travelled almost 20 kilometres in the hope of rescuing her and was one of about 40 local volunteers working to clear the debris.
He Xinchao, a survivor in Yueyuan village, told Xinhua that villagers had no inkling of the danger before mudslides destroyed every building in the settlement late on Saturday night.
'It was not raining very heavily in the county seat on Saturday night. We didn't know that torrents were crashing down from the mountains,' he said. 'Before I realised what was happening, the house was gone.'
He and his son were the only survivors from their 11-member family.
More than 300 homes were buried in Yueyuan, Xinhua reported, with the total number of casualties in the village still unknown.
