By Xinhua,
Chengdu (China) : One person was killed and 25 people were seriously injured when an aftershock measuring 6.4 on the Richter scale jolted Qingchuan county of southwest China’s Sichuan province Sunday afternoon.
Wang Fei, an official with the disaster relief office in Guangyuan city said the death and the injuries were caused by house collapse and landslide following the aftershock, the strongest of the 8,000 tremors felt till date after the killer May 12 quake hit Sichuan.
Details were not immediately available, Wang said.
An earthquake of 8.0-magnitude May 12 had wreaked havoc in Sichuan killing more than 60,000 people and injuring some 360,000. More than 24,000 people are missing in the earthquake.
The aftershock lasted for about a minute and many high-rises in Chengdu rocked slightly.
In Lueyang county of Hanzhong, the tremor caused a cave-in on a highway and disrupted traffic, said the county’s publicity official Chen Weiming.
Chen said no casualties had been reported, but some houses collapsed and landslides occurred.
Many fear the aftershock and subsequent landslides might hamper some 1,800 rescue workers trekking to reach the vicinity of the quake created Tangjiashan lake to blast its embankment and release the building water pressure before the artificial lake bursts and causes a flood.
Their earlier attempts to carry out the mission from helicopters were hampered by bad weather.
The Tangjiashan quake lake, which is in danger of bursting as water pressure kept building in it, is one of the more than 30 such lakes in rivers blocked by landslides from the earthquake and thousands of aftershocks.