5.5 aftershock adds to misery in China
163 survivors trapped since Monday are pulled from rubble
As morning dawned today, rescuers were holding out hope of finding more survivors and authorities were preparing for the daunting task of housing and feeding millions left homeless.
With the official death toll at more than 22,000, an air force unit reached Yinchanggou, a scenic spot in the mountains north of the Sichuan provincial capital of Chengdu, finding landslides had swept away rustic small hotels.
"There are several hundred hotels, including farmer homestays, probably 800 in all. They are all rubble now," Cai Weisu, an official with an air force unit from the Chengdu Military Region, told Sichuan Television. Most of the dead are tourists, he said, but he did not identify whether they were foreign or Chinese.
Tens of thousands of people are considered buried or missing throughout the disaster zone. There were about 12 million people living within a 60-mile radius of the epicenter of Wenchuan, according to a study on the potential impact of the quake by Xu Mingbao, a senior researcher at the University of Michigan's China Data Center.
And in response to swelling anger, government officials accustomed to tightly controlled media took the unusual step of fielding questions from people online about why thousands of schools that collapsed were not built to be quake-safe.
Damage from the magnitude-5.5 aftershock — one of dozens of strong tremors since the devastating quake Monday — was a temporary setback to the mammoth relief operation. Repair crews were rapidly restoring mobile phone services and unblocking roads within four hours, state media reported.
Trucks navigated around boulders and splintered pavement that clogged roads into the forest-clad mountains of Beichuan County. The official Xinhua News Agency reported that 33 survivors were pulled from the rubble of Beichuan's remote main city, surrounded by small coal and gold mines and tea plantations about 100 miles north of Chengdu.
Still farther afield, soldiers slogged up a slippery mud path into the village of Yingxiu as some of their comrades stayed back and used rubble from landslides to patch the road so supply and rescue vehicles could get closer.
Most buildings in the village collapsed in the quake and the rest appear damaged beyond repair. Hundreds of residents huddled in tents. Small groups of soldiers, some lugging body bags, rushed from place to place checking reports of people trapped. They pulled out bodies and — at least twice — survivors. Others dug a burial pit and laid in at least 80 bodies.
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