Sirens wailed as China paused in grief this morning as the country began three days of mourning for more than 30,000 victims of an earthquake that struck a week ago. But the search for survivors in the southwestern province of Sichuan went on as families refused to give up hope for their loved ones and despite the treacherous conditions.
Hundreds of aftershocks and continuing bad weather hampered the rescue operation.
The Transport Ministry reported that more than 200 relief workers had been buried by mudflows in recent days. Details were not immediately available. It was unclear whether any of those buried had been pulled out alive.
There have been numerous rockslides from unstable mountain slopes, and blocked rivers swollen by heavy rain have threatened to burst their banks.
Across the vast country of 1.3 billion people, air raid sirens and car, train and ship horns sounded to "wail in grief" at 2:28 p.m. (0628 GMT), the exact time the quake hit a week ago. People everywhere observed a three-minute silence. All public entertainment had been halted. The Olympic torch relay was suspended.
The national flag flew at half mast in Beijing's Tiananmen Square. In Beichuan, one of the worst hit towns in Sichuan, troops and other rescuers created makeshift wreaths from twigs stripped from trees and scrap paper pulled from debris. The Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges and the futures exchanges in Shanghai, Zhengzhou and Dalian halted trading for three minutes from 2:28 p.m.
In Beichuan, relatives continued to travel back into the disaster zone to look for family members and see the damage for themselves.
"It's a good idea but maybe it's a bit early,' said Zhou Wanli of the national state of mourning, sitting in the back of a truck heading into Beichuan. "All we can care about for the time being is finding our relatives. We don't want to memorialise them if we don't even know if they're alive or dead," he said.
The official death toll from the 7.9 magnitude quake stands at nearly 32,500. Some 220,000 people are reported injured and a further 9,500 are thought to be still buried under the rubble in Sichuan. Most are feared dead, but some are still being pulled out alive. Statistics from past earthquakes show victims have survived up to nearly a fortnight under rubble. There was a burst of elation in ruined Beichuan when one woman was found alive. Wang Hongguo, head of the rescue team, said she had found her under a mass of concrete. "We had to pull her out very gradually. She looked quite sturdy, so she might pull through," Wang said.
Rescuers also found a 50-year-old woman alive in the wreckage of a residential building at a coal mine. But seven days after the quake, rescuers mostly had the gruesome job of recovering decomposing bodies.
Dozens were pulled from the rubble in Beichuan today, and rescuers scattered lime and splashed disinfectant to prevent disease. Even with hundreds of troops poring over the wreckage, some using specialised equipment and sniffer dogs, others carried on the search themselves.
Farmer Wang Hongchen and his wife Chen Guangfen scrambled over hundreds of metres of rubble to look for their son, who worked as a mobile phone repair man in the town. "I think there's still hope. He worked on the first floor, so if he was lucky there would have been space for him to survive," Wang said, in between shouting out his son's name over the ruins.
"There's nothing I want more than to find him alive," added Chen.
"Other people who know their relatives have died can call this a memorial day, or a funeral, but not me yet." Officials have tried to keep people from the area because of aftershocks and a build-up of water in blocked rivers. Xinhua said the most dangerous mass of water was only about 3 km (2 miles) upstream from Beichuan. Rescuers had yet to reach all the stricken villages, Xinhua reported.
By late yesterday, 77 villages were still cut off. China says it expects the final death toll to exceed 50,000. Huge tent cities have sprung up in Sichuan to accommodate about 4.8 million people who lost their homes. A Foreign Ministry spokesman appealed to the international community to provide more tents. Donations from home and abroad have topped 6 billion yuan ($858 million).