RESCUE crews were fighting against time and poor weather after one of China's worst natural disasters in recent memory claimed at least 12,000 lives and left many more thousands missing under rubble.
A day after the 7.9 magnitude quake struck, state media said rescuers had reached the epicentre in Wenchuan county – cut off by the disaster and where the number of casualties was unknown. Rain was impeding efforts and a group of paratroopers called off a mission to the area due to heavy storms.
More than 12,000 people died in Sichuan province alone and 300 others in other provinces and the mega-city of Chongqing with its surrounding rural areas, the official Xinhua news agency reported.
Time is of the essence for rescue crews to save the buried. Only 58 people were extricated from demolished buildings across the quake area so far, China Seismological Bureau spokesman Zhang Hongwei told Xinhua.
"Survivors can hold on for some time. Now it's not time to give up," Wang Zhenyao, disaster relief division director at the Ministry of Civil Affairs, told reporters in Beijing.
In Mianyang city alone near the epicenter, 3,629 people were dead and 18,645 were still buried in debris, Xinhua reported. At least 4,800 people also remained buried in Mianzhu, 60 miles (100km) from the epicenter, the news agency added.
Meanwhile, at least 19 British tourists travelling in the affected area were unaccounted for, according to holiday tour group Kuoni. Earlier in the day, the British Foreign Office said around 100 British tourists in the area had all been accounted for.
A family stands in front of their house which was destroyed the day before by the earthquake. Picture: MARK RALSTON/AFP/Getty Images
The tremors caused a wide swath of damage across central China, sending people fleeing with their few salvaged belongings. Aftershocks rattled the region for a second day, sending people running into the streets in the city of Chengdu. The US Geological Survey measured the shock between magnitude 4 and 6, one of the strongest since the initial quake.
Just east of the epicentre, 1,000 students and teachers were killed or missing at a collapsed high school in Beichuan county, a more than six-storey building reduced to rubble about two metres high. The deaths were separate from another levelled school in Dujiangyan; 900 students are feared dead there.
Xinhua said up to 5,000 people were killed and 80 per cent of the buildings had collapsed in Beichuan, in a region of small cities and towns set amid steep hills north of Sichuan's provincial capital of Chengdu. The government has poured more than 16,000 troops into the area with tens of thousands more on the way.
In Dujiangyan, buildings were knocked down on every block and corpses were laid out in the street. People were seeking rides out of town, where makeshift tent cities were being erected as shelter from the steady rain.
Premier Wen Jiabao, who flew to the area to oversee rescue efforts, said a push was on to clear roads and restore electricity as soon as possible.
"We must try our best to open up roads to the epicentre and rescue people trapped in disaster-hit areas," he said.
China's Ministry of Health issued an appeal for blood donations to help the victims of the quake.
Expressions of sympathy and offers of help poured in from the Britain, the US and Japan, among others.
The quake was China's deadliest since 1976, when 240,000 people were killed in the city of Tangshan, near Beijing in 1976.
