The quake, with a magnitude of 7.8, struck close to densely populated areas of Sichuan province in South-West China.
Transport and communications networks around China were thrown into chaos after the powerful earthquake struck.
The death toll is currently near 10,000 and rising.
900 students were trapped in a 3 story school building when it collapsed, with at least 50 of the students being killed.
Thirty-one passenger trains and 149 cargo trains were stranded. A cargo train went off the rails and caught fire in a tunnel near Huixian County in north-western Gansu as the tunnel began to collapse.
That's basically all the highlights I've read about. Im interested in hearing more about this.
China is a country of 1.2 Billion people. Any death is awful, but I bet China has more deaths from car accidents in a month than they will have from this earthquake. It's awful to think about, but this is a blip for China and it will be forgotten in a month. Conveniently, no one will remember by the time the Olympics comes around...
mmm.. I agree with kanethegbrain...it will be quickly forgotten. Still, it is like Threadbo on a larger scale I heard. With people trapped. Since there are hundreds of ppl dead, they are less likely to be rescued. High priority people will be rescued before the school kids will. BTW what does BC stand for?
I don't know guys - have you seen the footage? Collapsed buildings don't get rebuilt in a month. I also heard on news radio that seismographs as far away as Ohio registered the quake. OHIO. Jiminy. There is so much rubble and they're having to go through it to find people that survived building collapses. I live in Oklahoma and was in high school when the Murrah Building was bombed. That was just one building, but the stuff I've seen on TV of China reminds me of that. It's horrible.
@dawn5555: Seismographs these days are incredibly sensitive. We used them to check the results of the North Korean nuclear test, and the force of the test (which clocked less than 1 kiloton IIRC, so it probably didn't actually go nuclear) is less than even magnitude 2 and 3 earthquakes.