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Quake-hit China declines Australian help
Sydney—China has declined Australia’s offer to
provide an expert search and rescue team to help find survivors of a
massive earthquake, citing logistical problems, an official said
Wednesday.
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd offered Australian aid to the Chinese
after a 7.9- magnitude quake rocked Sichuan province on Monday,
leaving at least 15,000 dead and thousands more buried beneath the
rubble.
“China responded Wednesday thanking Australia for the offer,” a
spokesman for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade told AFP.
“The extreme challenges of transport and communication in the
earthquake region mean that at this point the aid cannot be
received.”
Rudd, who speaks fluent Mandarin and who once worked as a diplomat
in Beijing, said on Tuesday that he had offered assistance,
including search and rescue capability, to Premier Wen Jiabao.
The government’s disaster coordination body Emergency Management
Australia had been on standby to send search and rescue personnel on
a commercial flight to the area worst-affected by the quake in the
country’s southwest.
While it has kept the door open to foreign offers of help, China
said Tuesday that conditions were “not yet ripe” for international
rescue workers to enter the country, citing damage to transport
links in affected areas.
Military helicopters dropped food and medicine to Chinese earthquake
survivors who remained cut off Wednesday 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 Wednesday 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 Wednesday 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.—AFP/AP
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