Death toll in landslide rises to 31 while more remain missing

Rescue workers search the site of a landslide in Liangshui village, Tangfang Town in the city of Zhaotong

Thirty-one people were confirmed dead while several remained missing yesterday after a landslide in a remote, mountainous part of China’s southwestern province of Yunnan, Chinese state media reported.

The disaster struck just before 6 a.m. on Monday in the village of Liangshui in the northeastern part of Yunnan.

Authorities said earlier that a total of 44 people were either missing or had been found dead.

Authorities resumed search and rescue operations yesterday after suspending the work temporarily due to another landslide alert.

More than 1,000 rescuers were working amid freezing temperatures and falling snow, according to the Ministry of Emergency Management. Two survivors were rescued Monday and were recovering at a local hospital.

State news agency Xinhua, citing a preliminary investigation by local experts, said the landslide was triggered by the collapse of a steep clifftop area, with the collapsed mass measuring around 100 meters-wide, 60 meters in height, and about an average of 6 meters in thickness. It did not elaborate on what caused the initial collapse.

Aerial photos posted by Xinhua showed the side of a heavily terraced mountain had spilled over several village homes.

Zhenxiong county lies about 2,250 kilometers southwest of Beijing, with altitudes ranging as high as 2,400 meters.

Rescuers struggled with snow, icy roads and freezing temperatures that were forecast to persist for at least the next three days.

Heavy snow has been falling in many parts of China, causing transportation chaos and endangering lives.

Last week, rescuers evacuated tourists from a remote skiing area in northwestern China where dozens of avalanches triggered by heavy snow had trapped more than 1,000 people for a week. The avalanches blocked roads, stranding both tourists and residents in a village in Altay prefecture in the Xinjiang region, close to China’s border with Mongolia, Russia and Kazakhstan.

Landslides, often caused by rain or unsafe construction work, are not uncommon in China. At least 70 people were killed in landslides last year, including more than 50 at an open pit mine in China’s Inner Mongolia region.

In all, natural disasters in China left 691 people dead and missing last year, causing direct economic losses of about 345 billion yuan ($48 billion, according to the National Commission for Disaster Reduction and the Ministry of Emergency Management. Meanwhile, the Ministry of Natural Resources enacted emergency response measures for geological disasters and sent a work team of experts to the site. MDT/AP