Survivors of China's deadliest earthquake in several years were treated in hospitals on Thursday and rescuers continued to deliver food and equipment, three days after the tragedy that saw the death toll rise to 135.
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The earthquake struck shortly before midnight on Monday evening, about 1,300 km southwest of Beijing. The disaster affected Gansu Province and, to a lesser extent, the neighboring province of Qinghai.
The new toll of 135 dead and nearly 1,000 injured announced by the official Xinhua News Agency on Thursday rose compared to the 134 deaths announced the previous day.
Doctors treated the injured on Thursday at the Jishishan County People's Hospital in Gansu, near the epicenter of the quake. They administered intravenous fluids and examined X-rays in a building that was visibly damaged by the tremor.
“I really want to go home,” one patient who needed leg surgery told AFP. “But my house was destroyed. So I don’t really know where to go.”
“People are always afraid of aftershocks. They cannot sleep well because there is no really safe place,” an official from Jishishan Canton told AFP.
AFP journalists noted on Thursday that a large number of large blue tents provided by authorities had been set up in Jishishan to replace improvised shelters built by residents shortly after the earthquake.
According to the United States Geological Survey (USGS), a reference on the subject, the earthquake occurred at 11:59 p.m. local time (3:59 p.m. GMT) on Monday evening, with the epicenter about 100 km from Lanzhou, the provincial capital of Gansu.
Dozens of weaker aftershocks followed and authorities warned that quakes of more than magnitude 5 were possible in the coming days.
Monday's earthquake was the country's worst since 2014, when more than 600 people were killed in the southwestern province of Yunnan.