A magnitude 6.8 earthquake hit China’s Sichuan province on Monday (5). The phenomenon, which was the strongest to hit the region since 2017, left more than 40 dead, causing tremors in the provincial capital of Chengdu and further afield.
In all, 46 people were killed in the earthquake, Chinese state media Xinhua reported in the early hours of Tuesday (6), local time, citing officials in the region in a press conference.
Some roads and houses near the epicenter were damaged by landslides, while communications were down in at least one area, according to state television.
No damage to dams and hydropower plants was reported within 50 km of the epicenter, although damage to the provincial grid affected power for around 40,000 users.
The epicenter was in the city of Luding, said the China Earthquake Networks Center, in the mountains about 226 km southwest of Chengdu. Earthquakes are common in the southwest Sichuan province, especially in its western mountains, a tectonically active area along the eastern border of the Qinghai-Tibetan plateau.
Laura Luo, who lives in Chengdu, a city of about 21 million people, was on her way to her apartment block when she saw people running out of their skyscrapers in panic after receiving earthquake alerts on their phones.
“Many people were so terrified they started crying,” Laura, a public relations consultant, told Reuters. “All the dogs started barking. It was really very scary,” she said, referring to when the earthquake started.
In Luding, the earthquake was so strong that it was difficult for some people to remain upright, while cracks appeared in some houses, the China News Service reported.
Videos on social media showed lights flickering as people ran from buildings onto the streets.
The Sichuan provincial government said more than 30 people had died. At least four of them were in Luding.
A total of 39,000 people live within 20 km of the epicenter and 1.55 million within 100 km, according to state television.
The quake was Sichuan’s biggest since August 2017, when a magnitude 7 phenomenon hit Aba province.
The most powerful Sichuan earthquake on record happened in May 2008, when a magnitude 8 event centered in Wenchuan killed nearly 70,000 people and caused extensive damage.
Monday’s earthquake was also felt in Yunnan, Shaanxi and Guizhou provinces, hundreds of kilometers away, according to state media.
Samantha Yang, 23, a resident of Chengdu, was in bed about to take a nap when the earthquake struck.
“The building continued to shake, more and more intensely than before,” said Samantha. “In fact, this was the scariest since the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake.”
(Additional reporting by Akriti Sharma in Bengaluru; editing by Kim Coghill, Robert Birsel, Frank Jack Daniel and Jan Harvey)
Source: CNN Brasil
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