36 die in Yunnan village landslide
(01-11 20:33)
A landslide killed at least 36 people including seven from a single family when it smashed into a remote village in southwestern China today, state-run media said.
Around a dozen more were also buried when the landslip engulfed 16 homes in the village of Gaopo, said Yunnan Web, run by the Yunnan provincial government, adding that emergency teams rescued two injured people from the debris, AFP reports.
Photos posted on the website showed rescuers in orange uniforms digging in wide swathes of clumpy mud against a backdrop of snow-covered, terraced hills.
A video posted on a Chinese social networking site appeared to show a group of villagers digging through thick mud and debris to uncover a body, which was carried away on a stretcher.
“The landslide, which brought about several hundred thousand cubic meters of watery mud to the village, buried all of the houses there,'' Xinhua quoted a local rescue team leader, Sun Anfa, as saying.
Snow was visible in images of the rescue, in an area that has experienced unusually low temperatures in recent weeks, with China suffering what authorities have called its coldest winter in 28 years.
Yunnan province, which borders Myanmar, Thailand, Laos and Vietnam, is a relatively impoverished area of China, where rural houses are often cheaply constructed.
Gaopo is in Zhenxiong county, in the northeast of Yunnan, a temperate province known for its tobacco industry and for being the home of Pu'er tea.
But its mountainous areas are prone to landslides and it is also vulnerable to earthquakes.
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