China Earthquake
large selection of photos and captions HERE
The Sichuan earthquake shook Wenchuan County, Sichuan province of the People’s Republic of China at 14:28:04 local time (06:28:04 GMT on Monday 12 May 2008). The earthquake was felt as far away as Beijing and Shanghai, where office buildings swayed with the impact and Vietnam capital Hanoi. The closest major city from the earthquake’s epicenter is Chengdu. Five major aftershocks ranging in magnitude from 4.0 to 6.0 were recorded within two hours of the main tremor.
Dale Grant, a USGS geophysicist, described the area as “very seismically active” but said Friday's temblor was the biggest there on record.
Xinjiang is a predominantly Muslim region with a culture that is distinctly different from that of China's ethnic Han majority.
A spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington said that almost five million people have been left homeless and 436,000 properties destroyed or heavily damaged in China's south-western Sichuan Province. They said the extent of the problem only became clear when communications were restored. So far, 22,069 deaths have been confirmed and thousands remain missing. Up to 50,000 may be dead.
Curious: China's chief nuclear weapons research lab is in Mianyang, along with several secret atomic sites.
Source: NYTimes
China began building the plants in the 1960s, calculating that their remote locations would make them less vulnerable to enemy attack.
China’s main complex for making nuclear warhead fuel, codenamed Plant 821, is beside a river in a hilly, forested part of the earthquake zone. It is some 15 miles northwest of Guangyuan in Sichuan Province. The vast site holds China’s largest production reactor and factories that mine its spent fuel for plutonium — the main ingredient for modern nuclear arms.
Below: the town of Yingxiu in Wenchuan County, southwest of Sichuan Province, two days after a 7.9-magnitude earthquake.
Photo: Chen Kai/Xinhua, via Associated Press
At least three dozen villages and towns in southwest China were still cut off from rescuers Thursday as tens of thousands of soldiers and emergency workers struggled against impassable roads and barriers of rubble.
ABC News: Rob Hill
An earthquake survivor sits amid debris in Yingxiu.
Photo: Liu Jin/Agence France-Presse -- Getty Images
Photo: Peter Parks/Agence France-Presse -- Getty Images
Tens of thousands of people remained missing in Sichuan Province and were presumed buried under the rubble.
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company