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Strong Earthquake Shakes Southwestern China


BEIJING – A powerful earthquake rocked a mountainous, steep area in southwestern China shortly after noon on Monday, and Chinese state television said at least 21 people were killed and more than 30 injured. love.

However, the full extent of the damage remained unclear as night fell, as the quake damaged communications systems in the remote, isolated area. In a sign that the damage could be heavy, China’s leader Xi Jinping personally ordered the government to “spar with efforts to rescue those affected,” state television said. newspaper on Monday night.

Initially, the China Earthquake Network Center estimated the quake to have a magnitude of 6.6, but later adjusted it to 6.8. The epicenter is quite shallow – about 10 miles below the Earth’s surface – and shallow earthquakes usually cause more damage than those far underground.

The epicenter was in Lude County, a remote area with many ethnic Tibetans in the southwestern corner of Sichuan province, close to that province’s borders with Tibet to the west and Yunnan province to the south. The US Geological Survey gave the exact location of the epicenter a few miles east of the Dadu River, which flows through a series of rapids and formerly small towns in a steeply sloping valley.

Satellite maps show that the terrain is somewhat similar to the area in northern Sichuan province, where a much stronger earthquake struck less than three months before the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. The previous earthquake, with a magnitude of 7.9, killed at least 69,000 peopleincluding thousands of children who died when their school collapsed.

Multiple landslides blocked steep mountain valleys and roads during the previous earthquake. Aid workers need several days to reach some communities where people are buried alive.

Chinese Army drop 15 paratroopers into an isolated area, but the deaths and injuries among these soldiers as they fell into the dense trees made it impossible for the government to continue such efforts. Those difficulties helped convince China to undertake a major program to import helicopters and to begin building more of its own helicopters.

Monday’s quake was the latest in a series of troubles to hit Sichuan province over the past month. Local government lock the province’s huge capital, Chengdu, with a population of 21 million, last Thursday in an effort to control the Covid-19 outbreak.

From the end of June to the end of August, the province also suffered the most heat wave on record, and the usual summer rains did not come. Severe drought has not only left farms parched, but also left very little water in the rivers that the province’s huge hydroelectric dams contain. can’t generate nearly as much electricity as usual.

That resulted in many factories shutting down for nearly two weeks at the end of August, as well as power outages that left people without electricity to air-conditioners as temperatures continuously spiked above 100 degrees. Some rain finally reached the province last week, but not enough to end the drought.

Li You Contributing research.



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