As authorities now focus on rehousing thousands of displaced people, the death toll from China’s deadliest earthquake in nearly a decade, which occurred on Monday, has been revised upwards from 131 to 148 died Friday, December 22, according to China’s official Xinhua news agency.
Striking just before midnight Monday evening, about 800 miles southwest of Beijing, the earthquake killed at least 117 people in Gansu province and 31 in neighboring Qinghai province, according to state media .
Across the two provinces, more than 139,000 people are sheltering in freezing cold in emergency shelters, according to state broadcaster CCTV, which reported that relief efforts in Gansu are now “refocusing their work entirely on rehousing displaced persons and care of the injured”. However, rescuers were still searching for victims trapped under the rubble in Qinghai on Friday morning, according to CCTV.
In this province, people were buried alive on Tuesday in Zhongchuan County by a “sand volcano”, a phenomenon of soil liquefaction under the effect of an earthquake.
Nearly 1,000 people were injured in the 5.9 magnitude earthquake, according to the United States Geological Survey (USGS). Dozens of aftershocks have been recorded since.
China is regularly the scene of earthquakes, sometimes very deadly. In September 2022, a magnitude 6.6 earthquake in Sichuan province caused the death of nearly a hundred people. In 2008, a huge earthquake in the same province left more than 87,000 people dead or missing, including 5,335 schoolchildren. And in 2010, a 6.9 earthquake in Qinghai left 3,000 dead and missing.
But this earthquake is the deadliest in the country since 2014, when another earthquake occurred in Yunnan province during which more than 600 people died.