China quake death toll nears 9,000 in one province

China's most devastating earthquake in three decades killed nearly 9,000 people in western Sichuan province yesterday and razed 80 per cent of the buildings in one county, initial estimates said.

The 7.8 magnitude quake struck in the middle of the school day, toppling eight schools in the region. Chemical plants and at least one hospital were flattened, trapping many hundreds, state media said.

Rescuers were still cut off from the epicentre in Wenchuan, a county of 112,000 people about 100 kilometres from the Sichuan provincial capital Chengdu, Xinhua, the state press agency said. The death toll was expected to rise significantly. More than 7,000 of the dead were in Sichuan's Beichuan Qiang Autonomous County, where 80 per cent of the buildings were destroyed.

"We are doing everything we can, but the roads are blanketed with rocks and boulders," Xinhua quoted Sichuan deputy party chief Li Chongxi as saying.

Most phone lines in Wenchuan were down and a website for the region's Aba prefecture said the quake had cut several major highways and communications were largely severed in 11 counties.

"The road started swaying as I was driving. Rocks fell from the mountains, with dust darkening the sky over the valley," a driver for Sichuan's seismological bureau was quoted by Xinhua as saying near the epicentre.

Beichuan, part of Sichuan's Mianyang city about 160 kilometres from capital Chengdu, has a population of 161,000, meaning about one in 10 residents was killed or injured.

About 900 teenagers were buried in the rubble of a collapsed three-storey school building in the Sichuan city of Dujiangyan.

Local villagers had helped dozens of students out of the ruins and cranes were excavating the site as parents looked on, Xinhua said.

"Some buried teenagers were struggling to break loose from underneath the ruins while others were crying out for help," the agency said.

Hundreds of people were trapped under collapsed schools, factories and dormitories in Shifang in Sichuan, Xinhua said, including several hundred trapped under two collapsed chemical plants.

Some 80 tonnes of highly corrosive liquid ammonia had leaked in Shifang forcing the evacuation of 6,000 people, it said.

Hundreds of people were buried under rubble in a collapsed hospital in Dujiangyan.

Troops had begun pouring into the region with sniffer dogs, life detection equipment, and some firefighters carrying explosives to blow up rocks piled on the roads, state television said.

Landslides had cut off three major rail lines leading to Chengdu, stranding 31 passenger trains and 149 cargo trains, Xinhua said, but no casualties had been reported.

The National Tourism Administration had ordered travel agencies to halt tour groups to or through the quake area.

The earthquake's force was enough to cause buildings to sway across China and as far away as the Thai capital Bangkok.

The Sichuan plain is one of China's most fertile areas, but it relies heavily on an irrigation system linked to the 2,000-year-old Dujiangyan flood control works - which means the quake could exacerbate inflation, already running at the fastest pace in 12 years.

The quake is also the worst to hit China in 32 years since the 1976 Tangshan earthquake in northeastern China where up to 300,000 died.

It has come at a bad time for China, which holds the Olympic Games in August, and has been struggling to keep a lid on unrest in ethnic Tibetan areas and the heavily Muslim northeastern Xinjiang region.

The US Geological Survey said on its website (http://earthquake.usgs .gov) the main quake struck at 0628 GMT at a depth of 10 kilometres.

Thousands of people were milling about in the main square of Chengdu late yesterday, where at least 45 had died and 600 were injured, state TV reported.