HANWANG, China — Soldiers rushed to shore up a dam cracked by this week’s powerful earthquake, and rescuers came by helicopter and ship Wednesday into the isolated epicenter but still were forced to dig for survivors with their bare hands.
Nearly 26,000 people were still buried in collapsed buildings from Monday’s 7.9-magnitude earthquake, and the death toll of almost 15,000 was expected to climb as relief operations spread into the mountains of Sichuan province. The quake triggered landslides that blocked roads to hardest-hit areas.
Even as the rescue effort seemed to gather momentum — speeded by clearing weather after two days of rain — caring for tens of thousands of people made homeless across the disaster zone have stretched thin the government’s resources.
Homeless victims begged for aid on roadsides, and people settled in for a third night in a growing sprawl of refugee camps littered with garbage. In Hanwang, a town in one of the hardest-hit counties, survivors stood hoping for handouts from cars, jostling with each other to reach to one vehicle where a passenger passed bottled water out the window.
The official death toll rose Wednesday to 14,866, and in Sichuan province another 25,788 people were buried and 1,405 were missing, provincial vice governor Li Chengyun said, according to the official Xinhua News Agency.
Xinhua said about 2,000 soldiers were sent to repair “extremely dangerous” cracks in the Zipingpu Dam upriver from the earthquake-hit city of Dujiangyan.
The government said late Wednesday that experts had inspected the dam and declared it safe, according to a statement broadcast on state TV and posted on the Sichuan province’s government Web site.
Still, another report said the reservoir behind the dam was being emptied to relieve pressure on the structure.
Help also began to arrive by helicopter and on foot in some of the hardest-to-reach areas, where some victims trapped for more than two days under collapsed buildings were still being pulled out alive. Leveled hospitals forced doctors and nurses to treat survivors in the street. Helicopters dropped food and medicine to isolated towns.
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