China: No survivors after landslide buries primary school children (VIDEO)
This picture taken on October 4, 2012 shows rescuers searching for victims after a landslide, triggered by sustained rains, buried a school and three farmhouses in Zhenhe village in Yiliang county, in southwest China’s Yunnan province. The bodies of 18 children and one adult were dug out from the mud.
Nineteen people, 18 of them children, have been confirmed dead after a landslide buried a primary school and three farmhouses in southwest China.
Some 100,000 cubic meters of mud hit Zhenhe village in Yunnan province early on Thursday morning, Xinhua reported.
By Friday afternoon, all 19 bodies had been recovered. No one else is thought to be missing.
Another adult was seriously injured but survived, a local official told Xinhua.
The Associated Press said some 2,000 people responded to the emergency, including locals, police officers, soldiers and medics.
Other residents trapped when a river was blocked have been evacuated from the area.
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The province was hit by two earthquakes in early September that killed 81 people and injured 800, the Guardian said.
The quakes were followed by torrential rains that triggered floods and mudslides.
According to Agence France-Presse, the school would not normally have been open, since China is in the middle of a week-long national holiday.
The pupils were receiving extra lessons to make up for the ones they missed because of the earthquakes.
They didn't usually attend that primary school, Xinhua said, but had been transferred since their own school was badly damaged by the quakes and had to be demolished.
More than 30 students were supposed to attend the catch-up classes; those who were at school when the landslide hit at 8 a.m. had arrived an hour before lessons were due to start.
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