Two people remain missing after one of China’s most powerful earthquakes in recent years killed at least 149 people in a remote northwestern region since it struck last week.
The 6.2-magnitude earthquake shook the provinces of Gansu and Qinghai — an area where many of the Hui people, a tight-knit ethnic minority characterised by its distinctive Muslim identity, reside.
In Gansu, more than 200,000 homes were destroyed, while 15,000 were on the verge of collapse, Chinese state media reported. The event displaced 145,000 people, killing 117 people in the province as of 22 December, with 781 wounded.
As of Monday, a total of 529 injured individuals from the 6.2-magnitude earthquake in Northwest China have been discharged from hospitals, with 255 injured still hospitalized, while the number of critically injured individuals has decreased from 42 to 12, media reported.… pic.twitter.com/TIkVxN4v0C
— Global Times (@globaltimesnews) December 25, 2023
Meanwhile, in Qinghai, 32 people died and two remain missing as of 24 December, according to state media.
Many of the destroyed houses were built from an earlier era, made of earth-wood or brick-wood structures, resulting in their poor defences against earthquakes, local authorities said.
The tragedy has thus highlighted the urgent need to build earthquake-resistant rural homes in the region, they added.
China has witnessed multiple strong earthquakes in recent history.
Ten years ago in the Sichuan province, more than 6,700 people were wounded and more than 160 were killed in a 6.6-magnitude earthquake. In 2010, a 7.1-magnitude quake killed 2,700 people in Yushu, a largely Tibetan area in Qinghai.