Earthquake hits Western China

A series of strong earthquakes has struck China's western Qinghai province.

Officials say at least 400 people have been killed, and 10,000 others have been injured. It is not known how many are still buried.

The earthquake, measured at magnitude 6.9, hit the remote county of Yushu near the Tibetan border, in the south of mountainous Qinghai.

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Soldiers and civilians used shovels and their bare hands to dig through collapsed buildings in search of survivors after strong earthquakes struck a mountainous Tibetan region of China on Wednesday, killing at least 589 people and injuring more than 10,000.

The series of quakes flattened buildings across remote western Yushu county and sent survivors, many bleeding from their wounds, flooding into the streets of Jiegu township. State television showed block after devastated block of toppled mud and wood homes. Local officials said 85 percent of the structures had been destroyed.

Residents and troops garrisoned in the town used shovels and their hands to pull survivors and bodies from the rubble much of the day. Several schools collapsed, with the state news agency saying at least 56 students died. Worst hit was the Yushu Vocational School, where Xinhua cited a local education official as saying 22 students died.

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BEIJING (AP) — Earthquake survivors shivered through a second night outdoors in a remote Tibetan corner of western China with rescuers fighting altitude sickness and dealing with a lack of supplies as the death toll rose to 760.

People with broken arms or legs cried in pain as medical teams could offer little more than injections. A doctor at the Qinghai provincial hospital, where the severely injured were being flown, said she had no idea how many were being treated because there was no time to count them all.

Stunned survivors wandered the dusty streets of Jiegu, where relief workers estimated 70% to 90% of the low-slung town of wood-and-mud housing had collapsed. Hundreds gathered to sleep in a plaza around a 50-foot (15-meter) tall statue of the mythical Tibetan King Gesar, wrapped in blankets taken from homes shattered by Wednesday morning's quakes.