China has started erecting temporary housing units after an earthquake destroyed 14,000 homes

Hundreds of temporary one-room housing units were being set up yesterday in northwest China for survivors of an earthquake that destroyed more than 14,000 homes and killed at least 135 people, according to state media reports.

Twelve people remained missing in an area hit by mudslides that inundated two villages, the reports said. Search teams were using excavators to dig out a thick sea of mud that covered roads and encased and blocked entry to buildings.

State broadcaster CCTV showed footage of cranes lifting white, box-like housing units and lining them up in an open field in Meipo, a village in Gansu province. About 260 had been erected, and the total in the village was expected to reach 500 across nine sites by Friday morning.

The arrival of the prefabricated units was a sign that many of the more than 87,000 people resettled after the Monday night earthquake may be homeless for some time. Many have been enduring temperatures well below freezing in flimsier tent-like units with blue plastic sheeting on the outside and a quilted cotton lining inside.

An assessment of the houses in a village visited by The AP on Wednesday found that 90% weren’t safe to live in, experts told CCTV in an online report. Some of the homes in Yangwa village appear OK, but they have structural damage that make them unsafe, the experts said. For those that can be repaired, the work may have to wait until next year, because the soil is frozen.

The death toll included 113 people in Gansu and another 22 people in neighboring Qinghai province. Nearly 1,000 were reported injured. The magnitude 6.2 quake struck in a mountainous region on the Gansu side of the boundary between the two provinces and about 1,300 kilometers southwest of Beijing, the Chinese capital.

Funerals have been held for the dead, some following the Muslim traditions of much of the population in the affected area.

The mud rose as high as 3 meters in two villages in Qinghai province, leaving only the rooftops of some buildings showing.

Experts quoted by CGTN, the Chinese state broadcaster’s international arm, said the earthquake liquefied underground sediment in the area, where the water table is relatively high. At some point, the muddy sediment burst through the surface and flowed down a usually dry ditch into the villages.

Most of China’s earthquakes strike in the western part of the country, including Gansu, Qinghai, Sichuan and Yunnan provinces, as well as the Xinjiang region and Tibet. The latest quake was the deadliest one in the country in nine years. MDT/AP