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05-09-2022
Bureau Report + Agencies
BEIJING/ KABUL/ ISLAMABAD: An earthquake of magnitude 6.8 in southwestern Sichuan province in China has killed seven people, state television CCTV reported on Monday.
The quake was recorded as the strongest to hit the province since 2013, with the shaking, felt in the provincial capital of Chengdu and hundreds of kilometres away in the cities of Xian and Changsha.
There were no immediate reports of any casualties, while the media reported some damage.
The epicentre was at the town of Luding at a depth of 16 km (10 miles), the China Earthquake Networks Centre said, about 226 km (140 miles) southwest of Chengdu, a city of about 21 million people.
“The shaking was quite strong and it lasted for a while,” said Shirley Li, who lives on the 30th floor of an apartment block in Chengdu, which is under a COVID-19 lockdown, after suffering summer heatwaves.
“It’s been a hard time for us heatwaves, the COVID lockdown and now the earthquake.”
An aftershock of a magnitude of 4.2 struck the city of Yaan, about 100 km (60 miles) southwest of Chengdu, minutes later.
Earthquakes are common in the southwestern province of Sichuan, especially its mountains in the west, a tectonically active area along the eastern boundary of the Qinghai-Tibetan plateau.
In Luding, the quake was so strong it was hard for some people to remain standing while cracks appeared on some houses, according to state media China News Service.
Video clips posted on social media showed lights swinging while people rushed out of buildings into the streets.
A total of 39,000 people live within a 20-km (12.5 miles) radius of the epicentre and 1.55 million within a 100-km (62 miles) radius, according to state television.
The quake was Sichuan’s biggest since April 2013 when a magnitude 7.0 quake hit the city Yaan, killing more than 100 people and injuring thousands.
“We heard the alarm sound via speakers 20 or 30 seconds before the earthquake,” said a Chengdu resident surnamed Yang.
Speakers broadcasting earthquake alarms are installed in communities and kindergartens and primary schools, Yang said.
The most powerful Sichuan earthquake on record was in May 2008 when a magnitude 8.0 quake centred in Wenchuan killed almost 70,000 people and caused extensive damage.
Monday’s quake was felt as far away as Changsha in Hunan province and Xian in Shaanxi province hundreds of kilometres away, according to social media posts.
Meanwhile, at least six people were killed and nine others injured after an earthquake in eastern Afghanistan overnight, an official said on Monday.
The 5.3-magnitude temblor that hit districts along the eastern border with Pakistan comes less than three months after a powerful quake killed more than 1,000 people, also along the same frontier.
The latest quake was felt in the provinces of Kunar, Laghman and Nangarhar, and in the capital Kabul.
“We are collecting information from other areas regarding casualties and damages,” deputy minister for disaster management Sharafuddin Muslim told media.
Afghanistan is frequently hit by earthquakes especially in the Hindu Kush mountain range, which lies near the junction of the Eurasian and Indian tectonic plates.
On June 22, the country’s deadliest earthquake in over two decades of magnitude 5.9, killed more than 1,000 people and injured thousands.
In 2015, about 380 people were killed in Pakistan and Afghanistan when a 7.5-magnitude earthquake ripped across the two countries.
In recent months Afghanistan has also been hit by flash floods that have killed about 200 people and destroyed thousands of homes.
Such disasters pose a huge logistical challenge for Afghanistan’s Taliban government, which has isolated itself from much of the world.
