Survivors pulled from rubble of China quake
The first foreign rescue workers since Monday's magnitude 7.9 temblor were allowed to the scene, and helicopters dropped leaflets urging people to "unite together" and providing survival tips. Officials have said the quake's final toll could reach 50,000.
A day past what experts call the critical three-day window for finding survivors, rescuers pulled a nurse to safety who had been trapped for 96 hours in the debris of a clinic in Beichuan county, Xinhua reported.
A call from the ruins of an apartment building drew a group of volunteers, who spent more than four hours using hands and spades to rescue a middle-aged woman. Brought to the surface, she could not speak and was given to medics.
"She had the will to live," said Xu Tao, one of the volunteers, a demobilized soldier and now an office worker in the eastern city of Tangshan. "I'm just exhausted."
About 10 people were pulled free Friday. Survivors also were being found elsewhere, with a man pulled from the wreckage of a fertilizer plant near Shifang city.
The U.S. Geological Survey said the latest tremor measured magnitude 5.5, one of the strongest among dozens that have shaken the area.
Education and housing officials, meanwhile, took the rare move of fielding questions online from angry Chinese citizens over the many children who died in the quake. The official death toll had risen to about 22,069 on Friday, and another 14,000 still were buried in Sichuan.
The government said it would investigate why so many school buildings collapsed in the quake — destroying about 6,900 classrooms, not including the hardest-hit counties — and severely punish anyone responsible for shoddy construction.
More than 4 million apartments and homes had been damaged or destroyed in Sichuan province, according to Housing Minister Jiang Weixin. Jiang said the water supply situation was "extremely serious" in Sichuan, and not flowing at all in 20 cities and counties.
In the town of Yingxiu, helicopters dropped leaflets urging people to "unite together" and providing survival tips. Power and water remained cut off, forcing dazed, exhausted locals to hike 40 yards up a steep hill to a spring to fetch water.
On another hillside, at least 80 corpses in plastic body bags were placed into a trench dug by soldiers.
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