The emergency teams of the Chinese province of Sichuan, in the southwest of the country, searched all day on Sunday 28 people who disappeared following a landslide on Saturday, caused by heavy rains.
Until now, a person’s death and several houses have been deplored. The landslide, with a length of approximately 1.2 kilometer, won with it some 100,000 cubic meters of earth and debris.
Nearly 1,000 people, including police, firefighters and health professionals, tried to find the 28 missing people. Some agents have sailed through the remains of collapsed buildings, using drones and detection radars to identify any sign of life with the help of local officials who knew the area well, said the public television CCTV.
They rescued two people injured and evacuated around 360 other people after the burial of 10 houses and an industrial building, said CCTV.
During a press conference held on Sunday, the authorities said that preliminary assessments attributed disaster to the heavy recent rains and local geological conditions.
Race against time
Chinese Deputy Prime Minister Liu Guozhong went there to guide the rescue operations and visited the affected residents. He urged the authorities to do everything to find the missing persons, according to the official news agency Xinhua.
Mr. Liu also noted that the surrounding slopes still had risks of collapse, calling for a scientific assessment to guarantee the security of the operation and avoid a new disaster, according to Xinhua.
China allocated 10.8 million euros to support emergency and reconstruction efforts.
Field landslides, often caused by rain or dangerous construction work, is not uncommon in China. Last year, at the end of January, a landslide in an isolated and mountainous region of the Yunnan provincein southwest China, killed more than 40 people.
