China quake toll hits 15K; 26K believed buried

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HANWANG, China — Military helicopters dropped food and medicine to Chinese earthquake survivors who remained cut off today in remote mountain villages behind roads clogged by landslides. The official death toll rose to nearly 15,000, and state media said tens of thousands more were buried or missing.

As help began to arrive in some of the hardest-to-reach areas, some victims trapped for more than two days under collapsed buildings were still being pulled out alive. But the enormous scale of the devastation meant that resources were stretched thin, and makeshift aid stations and refugee centers were springing up over the disaster area the size of Maryland.

The official Xinhua News Agency quoted government officials as saying rescuers who hiked today into the city of Yingxiu in Wenchuan county — the epicenter of Monday’s magnitude 7.9 quake — found it “much worse than expected.”

The official death toll rose today to 14,866, Xinhua said, but it was not immediately clear if that number included the 7,700 reported dead in Yingxiu. In Sichuan province alone, another 25,788 people were buried and 14,051 missing, provincial vice governor Li Chengyun said, according to Xinhua.

Unlike previous natural disasters in China, state media has reported prominently on the quake. State television has canceled regular programming to run 24-hour coverage.

Scenes of destruction and death have been shown, along with prominent focus on Premier Wen Jiabao, who rushed Monday to Sichuan to oversee the rescue work. He has been shown crawling into collapsed buildings to urge survivors to hang on, and seen reassuring children who had just lost their parents.

The toll was expected to rise further once rescuers reach other towns in Wenchuan that remain cut off from the Sichuan provincial capital of Chengdu more than two days after the quake. Roads leading to Wenchuan from all directions were still being cleared of debris, Feng Zhenglin, deputy minister of railway and transportation, said in Beijing.

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