China quake death toll rises to 131 as rescue efforts continue

The death toll from China's earthquake has risen to 131, with almost 1,000 people injured, as rescuers dig through the rubble in freezing temperatures.

Monday night's massive earthquake, the deadliest in years, hit the two neighboring northwestern provinces of Gansu and Qinghai, leveling village houses to rubble and dust.

Chinese media reports said on Wednesday that the displaced survivors of the earthquake had been transferred to temporary shelters amid frigid temperatures in the mountainous region.

“Now our lives are what matters a lot. Only if we are alive, will there be a living. If we are not here, then there’s no such thing as survival,” Ma Bajin from Yangwa village said.

One resident told AFP that as many as 35 people were huddled inside some tents where children lay under blankets, while the adults prepared food.

Nearly a thousand people who were injured had been sent to hospitals, with 87,000 survivors moving to "temporary shelters" in Gansu alone, CCTV said.

Temperatures in Jishishan are expected to dip as low as -17 degrees Celsius on Wednesday. Fears are growing that survivors could succumb to the bitter cold.

Chinese state media said 2,500 tents, 20,000 coats, and 5,000 rollaway beds had been sent to Gansu province.

Thousands of firefighters and rescue personnel have been sent to the disaster zone.

At least 118 dead in northwest China earthquake

At least 118 people were killed when an earthquake collapsed buildings in northwest China.

Meanwhile, government officials in Gansu said the search and rescue efforts had basically been completed by mid-afternoon Tuesday. The province’s death toll remained unchanged at 113 while the number of injured had risen to 782.

"Search and rescue work basically ended by 3 pm yesterday and the main work now is to treat the injured and resettle the affected population," an unidentified official from Gansu's Emergency Management Department told a news conference on Wednesday.

In Qinghai, search and rescue was still underway and teams were still looking for 16 people missing in an area where landslides had slammed into houses. Also, the death toll in the province had risen by four to 18.

Monday night's magnitude 5.9 earthquake, according to the US Geological Survey, struck at a shallow depth at 11:59 pm local time (1559 GMT) with its epicenter around 100 kilometers from Gansu's provincial capital, Lanzhou.

Dozens of smaller aftershocks followed and officials warned that tremors with a magnitude of more than 5.0 were possible in the next few days.

In 2014, more than 600 people were killed in a deadly quake in the southwestern Yunnan province.

In 2008, a massive earthquake in Sichuan province left more than 87,000 people dead or missing, including 5,335 schoolchildren.

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