China Drops Aid to Quake Victims, Death Toll Rises to Nearly 15,000

In a hard-hit town of Dujiangyan, Chinese relief workers pulled two children out alive on Wednesday. They’ve been trapped beneath rubbles for two days. And the rescuers pulled a woman eight-month pregnant to safety from under a collapsed department building.
But in many areas near the epicenter of earthquake, survivors are still buried below the debris. In Beichung county, rescuers tried to reach a girl trapped under a collapsed school. One of her legs is jammed between the walls.
Elsewhere in the county, people gather to identify bodies of their relatives. China official Xinhua news agency said Wednesday that the people liberation army has sent about 80,000 Chinese soldiers to help with the disaster relief. The troops faced a difficult journey through mountain roads blocked by rocks and mud slides.
Farmers in remote Hojong village said Wednesday that they were desperate for aid. The government has not come here yet, nobody is asking about us. No one cares about our food and water. Other villagers picked through ruins to find corn kernels to eat. Li sheng fang has been living in the wreckage of her former home. Now we can’t find food, we can’t eat rice.
In Chengdu, the capital of Sichung province, aftershocks force thousands of residents to camp out in the streets. That includes these patients at the maternity hospital. We are taking care the new-born babies. All the parents are absent. So we have to look after them and record their signs of life.
A deputy head of China Red Cross in Beijing, Wang Ping appealed for cash donations. We want people to give money instead of clothing and medicine because transportation is difficult now in Sichuan.
Chinese official said that death toll will keep rising as rescue crews dig through more of the rubble, trying to reach more than 20,000 people still believed to be buried.
The Chinese military is air-dropping food and medicine to earthquake survivors in remote mountain villages of Sichuan province, but time is running out for thousands buried under the rubble and mud of collapsed buildings, homes and schools.
China raised the official death toll again Wednesday to nearly 15,000. Authorities expect that number to go up as rescue crews arrive at the hardest-hit areas and begin digging through the rubble.
Officials estimate that an additional 40,000 people are either buried or missing.
As help arrived in some of the hardest-to-reach areas today, some victims were being pulled out alive.
The official Xinhua news agency says seven military helicopters have delivered supplies to Wenchuan county, the epicenter of the 7.9 magnitude quake, and several surrounding counties.
A local government official told Xinhua that only 2,300 of 10,000 residents in the southwestern town of Yingxiu survived the earthquake. The official says rescuers found the situation in Yingxiu worse than expected, with traffic cut off and children buried in debris.
The Sichuan provincial government says a hydropower plant located between the hard-hit areas of Dujiangyan City and Wenchuan County has been shut down. Local officials tell state-media that there are severe cracks in the dam, Zipingpu Hydropower Station, and that the plant and its buildings have collapsed and sunk.
Wenchuan county also is home to the Wolong Nature Reserve, China's largest breeding center for giant pandas.
A spokesperson for the State Council's Taiwan Affairs Office, Wang Yi, told reporters they finally made contact with reserve officials, who assured him that two pandas Beijing wants to send to Taiwan are safe. More than 50,000 troops have been sent to assist with relief work in quake-affected areas, but China has said conditions are not right for international teams to come in and help.