April 14 (Bloomberg) -- A magnitude 6.9 earthquake struck China’s Qinghai province on the Tibetan Plateau, killing about 400 people and injuring 8,000 in the nation’s deadliest temblor since the May 2008 disaster in neighboring Sichuan.
The region urgently needs assistance, Xinhua News Agency said, citing Huang Liming, an official from Yushu prefecture, the ethnic Tibetan region where the quake struck. Many local homes have been destroyed, the provincial government said.
Many people remain buried under rubble and more than 85 percent of houses collapsed in the town of Jiegu close to the epicenter, according to Xinhua, which reported the death toll. The government dispatched about 3,000 paramilitary police to the area to help relief efforts, state-broadcaster China Central Television said.
The quake struck at 7:49 a.m. local time about 375 kilometers (235 miles)southeast of the city of Golmud at a depth of 10 kilometers, the U.S. Geological Survey said on its Web site. There were four aftershocks with a magnitude of 4.8 or higher within four hours of the quake, it said.
Qinghai has a population of 5.57 million, the second- smallest of China’s provinces after neighboring Tibet. Golmud is located almost 2,000 kilometers west of Beijing.
Sichuan Province was hit by a magnitude 7.9 earthquake almost two years ago that killed about 90,000 people and flattened several million homes.
PetroChina Co., the world’s biggest company by market value, said it hasn’t received any reports of disruptions to its oil and gas fields in Qinghai.
“We’re currently unaffected by the earthquake because our fields are far away,” Zong Yiping, the unit’s general manager, said by mobile phone. The facilities are about 700 kilometers from the epicenter, he said.
--Michael Forsythe, Huang Zhe, Baizhen Chua. Editors: John Brinsley, Bill Austin
To contact the reporter on this story: Huang Zhe in Beijing atzhuang37@bloomberg.net
Last Updated: April 14, 2010 04:48 EDT
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