Chemical spills, creaking dams, tourists stranded 600 metres up a cable car line, and a fire burning for two days on a derailed freight train laden with petrol tankers were some of the relatively minor problems facing Chinese civilian and military rescue services after China's most devastating earthquake for 32 years.
More serious challenges involved trying to rescue thousands of people trapped under giant concrete beams, mangled steel and rubble at schools and factories in the southwestern province of Sichuan.
"I saw a village on the mountainside disappear in a landslide triggered by the earthquake," "Many vehicles on the road were swept away or hit by huge rocks,
Heavy rain and hundreds of aftershocks hampered the initial relief work.
The technical difficulties and the enormous scale of the damage prompted the government to hand overall control to the Chengdu military command and increase to about 100,000 the number of troops and paramilitary police to be deployed in quake-hit areas.
The confirmed death toll had already passed 15,000 and tens of thousands were reported missing and feared dead under collapsed buildings.
The full scale of the disaster became slightly clearer after troops began to report back from areas of Wenchuan that had been cut off for up to two days. "Some towns basically have no buildings left, they have all been razed to the ground, In one of those towns, Yingxiu, He Biao said only about 2,300 of the population of more than 10,000 were known to have survived the quake, and more than 1,000 of the survivors were badly injured.
Cries for help were heard from under the debris of a local school, but all roads were blocked and rescuers were forced to dig by hand, As in Yingxiu, rescue workers and doctors in several other towns were racing against time to save as many people as possible, sometimes hearing similar harrowing calls from buried people as they faced a daunting task of reaching them without cranes and excavators.
At least 400 people died in Zundao, including more than 50 children and three teachers from the kindergarten.
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