Beijing – More than 120 people were missing on Saturday after a landside triggered by heavy rain in south-western China buried dozens of homes, state media cited rescue authorities as saying.
A search for survivors with more than 1,000 workers was underway in Xinmo village after approximately 62 homes there were buried by masses of moving earth, the Xinhua news agency reported.
There appeared to be few survivors, with one family detailing how they barely escaped the disaster.
“Our baby saved me,” an injured father told a local broadcaster from the hospital. The man woke up early to care for his crying infant when he realized that the landslide was happening.
“My wife and I took the baby, ran off and were almost buried but survived in the end,” he said.
A second three-person family with an infant were able to be rescued, Xinhua reported.
The landslide hit the village, located in Maoxian county in Sichuan province, at around 6 am (2200 GMT Friday), blocking a 2-kilometre section of a river and burying 1,600 meters of road, according to Xinhua.
Pictures from the scene, shared by the People’s Daily newspaper group on Twitter, showed emergency responders walking among large mounds of rubble.
China’s president Xi Jinping on Saturday said rescue workers should do all they could to reach people buried by the landslides and minimize casualties.
The landslide occurred in a hilly area of Sichuan, inhabited by Tibetans and another minority group, the Qiang people.
A day earlier, two villagers died while four others were injured in Puge county of Sichuan province, also after rain-triggered landslides, Xinhua reported.
China has been experiencing weeks of heavy summer rains that have caused extensive flooding and triggered landslides.
In central China’s Hunan and Hubei provinces, flooding has affected at least 390,000 people this week, Xinhua said, adding that 9,000 people have been evacuated.
In some areas there was over 160 millimetres of rainfall in just one day. In the Hunan city of Yueyang, 47 reservoirs reportedly overflowed.
Heavy rain is forecast to continue in Hunan over the next few days.