2 quakes kill 4 in Chinese desert

BEIJING — Two strong earthquakes shook a remote desert region of northwestern China, killing at least four people and seriously injuring eight others, the government said Sunday.

Local officials reported collapsed houses and scores of minor aftershocks.

The quakes — magnitudes 6.1 and 5.8 — hit Gansu province at 8:41 p.m. and 8:48 p.m. Saturday, the official Xinhua News Agency reported from Lanzhou, the provincial capital. Another 17 people suffered minor injuries, it said.

A magnitude 6 earthquake can cause severe damage. Gansu's seismological bureau said it expected more reports of injuries.

The areas hit hardest were in Minle and Shandan counties near the city of Zhangye, about 850 miles west of the capital, Beijing, the bureau said.

Xinhua, quoting the provincial seismological bureau, said 30 percent of houses near the quake epicenters were damaged severely and 90 percent of buildings in Yaozhaizi, a small nearby village, had collapsed.

An official reached in Shandan County said the area had experienced more than 200 aftershocks in the hours since the two big temblors. Most were minor, he said.

The State Seismological Bureau in Beijing said the most severe aftershock was magnitude 4.0.

Officials in Minle and Shandan counties said they still were assessing damages Sunday and had no details. They would not give their names.

The area is located in a narrow corridor between the Gobi Desert to the northeast and mountains that line the border between the provinces of Gansu and Qinghai.

The Hong Kong Observatory reported one "intense" tremor at 8:46 p.m. Saturday and said the epicenter was at the border of Gansu province with neighboring Qinghai province. It estimated the magnitude at 6.1.

In Colorado, the U.S. Geological Service's Earthquake Information Center measured the quakes at 5.7 and 5.5, according to geophysicist John Minsch.

A central government task force was reported en route to the affected area Sunday morning.

Earlier this month, a strong earthquake rumbled through a remote, seismically active area of China's mountainous southwest, killing three people and felling at least 50 houses in an ethnic minority enclave in Yunnan province. Fourteen people were seriously injured in Dayao County.

In July, a 6.2-magnitude quake in Dayao county killed at least 15 people and injured 294. Local officials said many residents were still rebuilding homes damaged in the earlier quake when the temblor Thursday night caused further destruction.

The deadliest earthquake in China this year struck an area near Kashgar in the northwestern region of Xinjiang on Feb. 24, killing 268 people. Xinjiang abuts Gansu.

The worst earthquake in China's recent history hit on July 28, 1976, in the northeastern city of Tangshan, not far from Beijing — a tremor whose magnitude was as high as 8.2. More than 240,000 people were killed.