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Three rescued five days after Kyigudo earthquake

By Jane Macartney | Times Online

Four-year-old girl Cairen Baji is carried by a rescue worker after they dug her and an elderly woman out from a collapsed mud house near Jiegu town in earthquake-hit Kyigudo (Ch: Yushu county in Qinghai province) on 19 April 2010. Relatives kept Wujian Cuomao, 68, and Cairen Baji alive for five days by sending them food and water through gaps in the rubble with the help of bamboo poles, state broadcaster CCTV said.AP/China

Battling freezing temperatures, snow flurries and high altitudes, Chinese rescuers have pulled three survivors alive from the rubble more than five days after an earthquake devastated a remote Tibetan community.

The most recent rescue came just after 6pm — or 130 hours or so after the 7.1 magnitude tremor struck northwestern Kyigudo (Ch: Yushu county) — when a woman was pulled out of the ruins of a hillside community.

The 34-year-old woman, named as Ripu, was found half-buried by rescuers who have started a blanket search from the county town of Jiegu and into isolated hillside settlements. She was in a stable condition and had been rushed immediately to hospital.

The success came six hours after four-year-old Cairen Baiji and Wujian Cuomao, 68, were freed from the wreckage of a mud-built house. The pair had been trapped when it collapsed early on Wednesday morning.

Their lower bodies were buried by the packed earth but they were saved because they had taken refuge under a bed. Relatives and neighbours had been keeping them alive by sending in food and water through gaps in the rubble with the help of bamboo poles, state broadcaster CCTV said.

A rescue team reached the village, about 20 kilometres (13 miles) from the main county town of Jiegu early this morning. They at once began digging through the ruins for the two survivors. The pair were brought out shortly before midday.

The white-haired woman, dressed in a long traditional chuba robe, waved her arms as she was lifted onto a stretcher and loaded into an ambulance. Her condition was described as critical.

The little girl was diagnosed with heart problems when she was finally dug out and handed into the arms of waiting rescuers because of the trauma of being trapped, but her condition had stabilised and doctors said she just needed rest.

The death toll has now been raised to 1,944 with 216 still missing after the deadliest tremor to strike China since an earthquake in 2008 killed some 90,000 people living further east along the same fault line.

Some 1,000 of the dead were buried or cremated in mass funerary pyres at the weekend. The fires were set by the hundreds of monks who live in surrounding monasteries, or who have flocked to Yushu from surrounding Tibetan regions, to help with the rescue work and to provide spiritual comfort and physical aid to the injured and survivors.

Officials say 12,315 people have been injured, of whom 1,134 were in serious condition and had mostly been flown out to larger hospitals elsewhere in China.

The main town of Jiegu, centre of a community of about 100,000 people has been razed, and thousands of troops are racing to put up tents for the homeless with temperatures falling well below freezing at night. They are rushing to provide sufficient food and water to people shivering and traumatised at an altitude of 4,000 metres (13,000 ft).

Convoys of military supply trucks were at a standstill, backed up for miles on the main two-lane road headed into town. At a supply depot set up on the town’s edge, huge stacks of bottled water were piled up outside a warehouse.

More relief goods rumbled past mountainside hamlets where residents pitched government-provided tents along the rutted road that is the only connection between Jiegu and the provincial capital of Xining.

Bedraggled survivors streamed from their tents and chased the trucks, the women scooping bread rolls and packets of instant noodles into the aprons of their traditional fur-lined robes.

Copyright © 2010 Times Newspapers Ltd.

Published in Times Online