Beijing:
A middle-of-the-night landslide buried hundreds of homes and flooded hundreds more in a remote mountainous region of northern China's Gansu Province early Sunday, leaving 127 people dead and nearly 1,300 more missing, officials said Sunday evening.
Premier Wen Jiabao, who frequently flies to major disasters, traveled to a town near the hardest-hit city of Zhouqu, in far southern Gansu, to supervise relief operations. Rescuers on the scene told the state-run Xinhua news service that earthmoving vehicles could not reach the scene and that workers were digging with hands and shovels to reach people.
"Torrential rains began to fall at around 10 p.m. Saturday. Then there were landslides and many people were trapped," the head of Zhouqu county, who goes by a the single name Diemujiangteng, told Xinhua. "Now sludge has become the biggest hindrance to our operations. It's too thick to walk or drive through."
The state-run CCTV broadcaster placed the death toll at 127. Xinhua, which earlier placed the number of missing at 2,000, lowered the figure on Sunday evening to 1,294. But it was uncertain how many were hit by the slide or had simply fled. Grainy video from the town showed streets covered in thick mud and debris.
"There's water everywhere," Liu Yiping, an official in the Zhouqu government, told CCTV by telephone. "It's flooded everything. It's just too horrible to witness. It's so awful."
The government said it had sent 2,400 soldiers from Lanzhou, the Gansu capital some 275 kilometers (180 miles) to the north, to help with the rescue. Another 1,000 firefighters and other workers were marshaled from nearby towns.
The slide appeared to be the worst in a string of weather-related events that have struck China in a summer marked by torrential rain and insufferable heat. The government said on Aug. 4 that floods had hit 28 provinces so far this year, killing 1,072 and leaving 619 missing. The waters have wrecked 1.1 million homes and caused damages totaling 209.6 billion renminbi, or about $31 billion. A July 27 slide triggered by heavy rain buried at least 21 people in Sichuan province.
While floods have largely plagued the north, much of southern China has limped through its worst drought in decades, forcing the government to import and burn vast stocks of coal to supplement dwindling hydroelectric power.
Sunday's landslide struck a rural area on the Sichuan border, which is about one-third ethnic Tibetan, including many farmers and herders. Officials said the slide hit about midnight in Zhouqu, a city of about 40,000 people bounded on both sides by steep mountains and bisected by the Bailong River, which runs lengthwise through the narrow valley.
The debris from the landslide blocked the river, creating a nine-meter-deep (30-foot) lake that flooded half the town by 1 a.m. and sent residents fleeing to upper floors of buildings. Some of the missing were believed to have been swept away by floodwaters.
Xinhua said the mudflow, sometimes two meters thick, inundated buildings and major roads in an area about five kilometers long and 500 meters wide. More than 300 homes in an adjacent village, Yueyuan, were also covered by the slide, rescuers said.
By noon Sunday local time, 680 persons had been rescued and 45,000 evacuated from the slide area. Another 76 were reported to be injured. By mid-afternoon, workers had reopened debris-blocked roads to the town, Xinhua said, but floodwaters in the center city were still impeding rescuers.