School collapses in focus as China buries quake dead

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Fri, May 16 10:48 AM

By John Ruwitch

MIANZHU, China (Reuters) - China struggled to bury the dead and help tens of thousands of injured, homeless and hungry on Friday, four days after a massive earthquake which is expected to have killed more than 50,000.

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao called on officials to ensure social stability as frustration and exhaustion grew among survivors, many of whom lost everything and are living in makeshift tents or in the open air.

Anger has also focused on the state of school buildings, many of which crumpled, burying hundreds of children, when the quake struck, prompting China's Housing Ministry to order an investigation.

In the village of Houzhuang in the southwestern province of Sichuan, the area worst hit by Monday's 7.9 magnitude quake, residents said they were coping on their own, with aid and troops yet to reach them.

"We ate some corn, but now we are suffering from diarrhoea after drinking water from the ditch for two days," said a Houzhuang resident surnamed Liu.

He said more than 90 percent of the buildings in his village, in the hard-hit county of Anxian, were flattened.

"Now we've been trying to get things out of the debris to use, like clothes, but we're very frightened that there will be another earthquake, so we have to be very careful," he said.

China has mobilised 130,000 army and paramilitary troops to the disaster area, but the quake buckled roads and triggered mountain landslides, meaning that relief supplies and rescuers have struggled to reach the worst-hit areas.

From the heart of the disaster zone, Wen urged rescuers on, but hopes were fading for those still trapped under rubble.

"It is still within the critical period of saving lives, and we won't give up even if there exists the slightest hope of finding more survivors," Xinhua quoted Wen as saying.

But some expressed frustration at the resources still being devoted to finding survivors among the some 25,000 who remain buried. Officials said another 20,000 have died in the quake.

"The focus is on saving lives, and they say food and a place to live are small issues as long as you're alive," said Fan Xiaohua, who was organising volunteers at a relief coordination centre in Mianzhu. "In fact, they are very big issues right now."

Relief workers said food, water and tents were urgently needed.

COLLAPSED SCHOOLS

President Hu Jintao headed to Sichuan on Friday to meet victims and inspect the rescue and relief effort, Xinhua said. It will be his first trip to the region since the disaster struck.

Anger has also focused on the school collapses.

In the town of Dujiangyan, a school collapse buried 900 students. In Wufu, nearly every building in the village withstood the quake but for a primary school, whose collapse killed some 300 students.

"Our child wasn't killed by the earthquake. She and the others were killed by a derelict building. The officials knew it was unsafe," said Bi Kaiwei, whose 13-year-old daughter was among the dead.

There were concerns as well about epidemics if the dead were not soon buried or cremated.

"We are in urgent need of body bags," Bai Licheng, a Communist Party official in Sichuan's Yingxiu, told Xinhua.

"Air-dropped food and drinking water are limited and far from meeting the demand," he added.

Bodies were lined up along the town's riverbank in Yingxiu, where more than 3,000 soldiers were searching for survivors.

The Ministry of Health issued a notice ordering bodies to be cleaned where they were found and buried as soon as possible, far from water sources and downwind from populated areas.

Bai said bodies were still trapped in the debris and blocked roads meant that heavy lifting gear could not get through.

Hundreds of damaged dams have also raised fears of collapse or flooding that could inundate towns and cities that are already struggling to recover from the quake.

The country's top economic planner allocated 53 million yuan ($7.6 million) on Friday in emergency funds to assess the damage to reservoirs.

China has asked the United States for satellite images to help locate victims and identify damaged infrastructure. In Sichuan and neighbouring Chongqing, reservoirs have been damaged, some dams have cracked or are leaking water, and officials have warned the full extent of the hazard was as yet unclear.

China was accepting foreign help to bolster rescue efforts in the disaster, the deadliest since up to 300,000 people were killed in a 1976 earthquake in the northeastern Chinese city of Tangshan.

The first foreign rescue team, a group of about 60 people from Japan, reached Sichuan on Friday. China has accepted further offers of rescue teams from Russia, South Korea and Singapore, the Foreign Ministry said.

(Additional reporting by Ben Blanchard in Shifang, Emma Graham-Harrison in Yingxiu, and Jason Li in Houzhuang)

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