This is absolutely terrible!!!

Death toll passes 12,000, 18,000 under rubble in China

JIANG YOU, China (CNN) -- More than 18,000 people are reported buried under rubble in just one earthquake-hit city of China as teams of rescuers battle through power cuts, mudslides and heavy rain in desperate efforts to reach them.

Chinese state media, Xinhua News Agency, reported Tuesday that 18,645 people are under rubble in the city of Mianyang, which neighbors the epicenter of the earthquake.

It also reports that 3,629 people have died in the city.

The death toll has now exceeded 12,000 in Sichuan province alone, The Associated Press reports.

The government had earlier announced a death toll from Monday's quake of 11,921 for Sichuan and the surrounding provinces and the city of Chongqing.

A string of nearly 30 seismic aftershock jolts hit the province in the first 24 hours following Monday's quake and slowing the progress of 1,300-strong rescue teams. All of those quakes were magnitude 4.0 and above.

A Chinese Civil Affairs Ministry official said his country welcomes foreign donations of money and materials, but it is not ready for outside teams of rescue and relief workers because its transportation system couldn't handle the additional traffic.

Roads blocked by rocks and mudslides had hampered the effort to reach the epicenter in Wenchuan County, forcing military doctors and soldiers to walk to reach the area almost 24 hours after the 7.9 magnitude earthquake shook central China, Xinhua said.

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao ordered the military to make it a top priority to open the roads into Wenchuan County, home to about 100,000 people, by mid-day Tuesday. The premier arrived in the earthquake zone Monday to personally direct the relief efforts.

Several thousand additional soldiers should reach the area later Tuesday afternoon, Xinhua said.

Heavy rains forced the military to cancel plans to drop Chinese People's Liberation Army paratroopers into the Wenchuan area, Xinhua said. Bad weather also has grounded all helicopter relief efforts, the military said. Impact Your World

Communications with survivors near the epicenter has been difficult because of broken telecommunication lines and poor weather. An official using a satellite phone did give an initial report that about a third of all buildings had collapsed and another third were seriously damaged, Xinhua said. Watch rescue efforts at school hit by quake »

The Chinese government said the death toll was sure to rise as authorities began to reach some of the worst-hit areas. Thousands remained trapped under the rubble, including hundreds of children at a half-dozen schools.

"Blocked roads, disrupted communication and continuous rainfall have all created obstacles to our rescue efforts," Wen said, according to Xinhua. "People's lives and property safety are the top priorities and many people are still trapped in debris." Watch a report on the growing toll inflicted by the quake »

In Guixi Township -- 22 miles (35 km) from the epicenter -- thousands of residents huddled under makeshift tents and tarps, their only shelter from a steady rain Tuesday.

Row after row of houses collapsed during the earthquake, leaving people with no place to go. Many injured and hungry people wondered the streets, creating a scene of human misery. The roads to the town are open, but still no relief workers were around.

An expert told CNN the earthquake, which struck at 2:28 p.m. (2:28 a.m. ET) Monday, was the largest the region has seen "for over a generation."

CNN's John Vause saw block after block of devastation in the town of Jiang You, about 60 miles (100 km) from the epicenter, arriving there about a day after the quake hit.

"These people who live in the city are now hunkering down under tarpaulins and under tents," Vause said, as a steady drizzle added to the misery. "Many are afraid to go back indoors because their buildings are no longer safe."

The area is also the refuge for much of China's panda population. The fate of the 130 pandas housed at the Wolong Giant Panda Protection and Research Center was unknown, Xinhua reported.

President Bush said the United States is prepared to help China "in any way possible" in the quake's aftermath.

A top U.S. aid official said Beijing had not yet requested assistance.

The United States has search-and-rescue teams standing by in Virginia and California, said Ky Luu, the director of foreign disaster assistance for the U.S. Agency for International Development. Washington is also prepared to send a disaster assistance response team if asked, he said.

The quickest way to help would be sending money, he said. The U.S. ambassador is speaking to Chinese officials and once a disaster declaration is made, the government will release federal money to help.

Luu said Beijing has good disaster-response mechanisms of its own.

"The Chinese have a strong capability of responding," he said, adding that the United States doesn't want to displace the internal expertise. "There is a 72-hour window of opportunity and it may be best to support regional teams on the ground."

Some 20,000 Chinese troops have been deployed to the region, while another 24,000 are scheduled to be airlifted to affected areas, Xinhua reported. Another 3,000 police officers have been activated.

"It looks like they've mounted a pretty monumental effort to do the best that they can there," said Kate Janie, director of Mercy Corps, a humanitarian group channeling disaster aid to the region through a partner agency. "I think the Chinese government will make very active, proactive, transparent steps in dealing with this."

Zhenyao said 60,000 tents and 50,000 quilts have been dispatched to the disaster zone.

Chengdu Shuangliu International Airport reopened Tuesday after authorities inspected its runways for damage following the quake, Xinhua reported. The resumption of air service gives the province additional links for funneling supplies into the badly battered region.

China Eastern Airlines said it is ferrying in hundreds of rescue personnel and tons of cargo from eastern China, according to state-run media.

Joe Guo, a university student in Chengdu, told CNN the scene is chaotic as the military tries to rush aid into the surrounding rural areas.

"The traffic is not good because a lot of the roads were seriously damaged," Guo said on Tuesday. "The army people -- they were just running there to get the stuff in and the injured people out."

Some 2,000 tourists were stranded in the northwestern part of the province and a landslide buried a tourist coach in Sichuan's Maoxian County, killing 37, Xinhua reported.

Forty-eight tourists made their way out of the region on foot and arrived in Dujiangyan on Tuesday, state-run media said. Among the stranded tourists were 15 Britons.

The British tourists were likely in Wolong at the Panda center, according to Xinhua.

The Red Cross Society of China, coordinating some international aid efforts, encouraged financial donations because of the difficulty of getting supplies to those most in need.

At least six schools collapsed in the quake or its aftershocks, Xinhua reported. At one school, almost 900 eighth graders and ninth graders were believed to be buried, a villager said.

By Monday night, at least 50 bodies had been pulled from the rubble at Juyuan Middle School in Juyuan Township of Dujiangyan City, Sichuan Province, Xinhua reported.

"Some buried teenagers were struggling to free themselves from the ruins while others were calling for help. Eight excavators were working at the site. Devastated parents watched as five cranes worked at the site and an ambulance waited," Xinhua reported.

Some 600 people were confirmed dead and another 2,300 people were buried under two collapsed chemical plants in Sichuan's Shifang city, where 80 tons of ammonia leaked, Xinhua reported. The plants were among a series of buildings that collapsed, including private homes, schools and factories.

Much of the nation's transportation system was halted. Xinhua reported there were "multiple landslides and collapses along railway lines" near Chengdu.

Sichuan Province sits in the Sichuan basin and is bordered by the Himalayas to the west. The Yangtze River flows through the province and the Three Gorges Dam in nearby Hubei Province controls flooding to the Sichuan -- though there were no reports of damage to the world's largest dam.

While many of the most immediate efforts were focused on Sichuan Province, Xinhua reported that there were dead and injured also in Gansu, Chongqing and Yunnan.

A 40-car freight train, carrying 13 tankers full of gasoline, derailed and caught fire Monday in Gansu province, officials said, according to state-run media, cutting the Baoji-Chengdu railway.

Other stories of destruction poured in from around the country. Xinhua said one person was killed in Santai County, in the city of Mianyang, when a water tower fell.

A provincial government spokesman said officials feared more dead and injured would be found in collapsed houses in Dujiangyan City in Wenchuan County.

Bonnie Thie, the country director for the Peace Corps, told CNN she was on a university campus in Chengdu, in the eastern part of China's Sichuan province about 60 miles from the epicenter, when the first quake hit.

"You could see the ground shaking," Thie told CNN.

The shaking "went on for what seemed like a very long time," she said.

Bruce Presgrave, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey, said the quake's effects were heightened because of its strength, proximity to major population centers and shallow depth. Shallow quakes tend to do more damage near the epicenter than do deeper ones, he said.

An earthquake with 7.5 magnitude struck the northern Chinese city of Tangshan in 1976, killing 255,000 people -- the greatest death toll from an earthquake in the last four centuries and the second greatest in recorded history, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Tangshan is roughly 995 miles (1,600 km) from Chengdu, the nearest major city to the epicenter of Monday's quake.

Monday's quake shook the ground in Beijing, 950 miles (1,528 km) away. Residents of the capital, which hosts this year's Olympic Games in August, said they felt a rolling sensation that lasted about a minute. It resulted in the evacuation of thousands of people from Beijing buildings.

A spokesman for the Beijing Olympic Committee said no Olympic venues were affected.

The earthquake was also felt in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Taiwan, and as far away as Hanoi, Vietnam, and Bangkok, Thailand, according to the Hong Kong-based Mandarin-language channel Phoenix TV

I saw a video on the CNN web site --- it looks horrible and the area covered is HUGE!

I should have started a new thread. The title here "bad karma"is regrettable.