6A
Thursday, March 21. 1996
UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Thousands homeless after quake in China
The Associated Press
BEIJING — An earthquake has leveled remote towns in northwestern China, killing at least 24 people, most of them young children, and leaving 10,000 homeless.
Tuesday, the magnitude 6.9 quake struck houses along the Silk Road in the Xinjiang region.
The quake and 68 aftershocks of up to magnitude 5.1 caused 50,000 buildings to collapse and cracked a dike, government seismologists said yesterday. At least 78 people were injured.
nine of them seriously.
Casualty reports were incomplete because of loss of communication with Jiashi County. By yesterday afternoon, only one village in the county had reported in.
Jiashi is 43 miles east of Kashgar, an ancient bazaar town. The epicenter was near Artux, 15 miles north of Kashgar.
Many people were at home when the quake struck at 11 p.m. Seventeen children under the age of eight were killed, said Bake Akiy, director of the Kashgar Seismology Bureau.
"They were home watching television and couldn't get out fast enough." Ali said.
Most houses are one story, made of baked mud bricks and topped by wooden beams that could cause heavy casualties if they collapsed.
A rescue worker in Jiashi said, "There are no buildings left standing."
"Nobody can stay in their own homes because some have completely collapsed and others are damaged too seriously to be safe," a local reporter said in a phone interview broadcast on
The reporter said tents were going up to house women, children, the sick and elderly, but there would be no shelter for others.
national television.
Temperatures in the desert were expected to drop to 37 degrees, she said.
Roads in the county had large cracks, but traffic could still get through, the report said.
Cracks more than 1 1/2 feet wide opened along a 2,000-foot section of a dike.
More than 6,300 head of livestock, mostly sheep, were
reported killed.
In Kashgar, local officials said several hundred homes were damaged by the quake.
Local residents said yesterday there was little visible damage. Robert Kerr, an American student, said he had seen a few minor cracks in buildings.
The area is 2,000 miles west of Beijing, near China's border. It is a crossroad along the old Silk Road that joined East to West. Most of its inhabitants are Muslim ethnic minorities, including Uygurs, Kırgız and Tajiks.