UCHURPAN, China — More than 12,000 people remained in tents and hard-covered shelters and lit bonfires to avoid the frigid weather Wednesday as aftershocks from an earthquake continued in western China.
A day earlier, a magnitude 7.1 earthquake struck a remote part of China’s Xinjiang region, killing three people, injuring five others and damaging hundreds of buildings.
The earthquake caused significant damage, but the sparse population and recent efforts to make homes more durable around the epicenter in Uchyturpan province, near the border with Kyrgyzstan, saved lives. Damage to property was relatively light.
Footage broadcast by state broadcaster CCTV on Wednesday showed evacuees eating instant noodles while lighting bonfires inside tents.
Jiang Ngewa, a 16-year-old student from Uchuturpan, said she was in the bathroom when the earthquake started. The entire building shook violently.
“I thought we had to evacuate to a safe place as soon as possible,” Jiang said.
He took shelter at the school and was staying in a dorm room with his grandfather along with about 200 others. Local officials said they would check the stability of housing before people return.
The quake occurred in a sparsely populated region with towns and villages scattered across a barren winter landscape. The area is about 125 kilometers (78 miles) from the city of Aksu, which is crossed by a two-lane highway, with frozen brown plains on one side and rocky outcrops on the other. Power lines and the occasional cement factory are virtually the only signs of human presence.
In the Kyzyrus Kyrgyzstan region, the earthquake caused varying degrees of damage to 851 buildings, collapsed 93 buildings near the epicenter, and killed 910 livestock, according to Deputy Secretary of the District Party Urziali Hashkhaerbay. .
The region is home to Kyrgyz and Uyghur ethnic minorities, who are primarily Muslim Turks, and are the subject of a state campaign of forced assimilation and mass detention. The area is highly militarized, and state broadcaster CCTV showed paramilitary forces arriving before dawn to remove rubble and set up tents for displaced people.
Two of the three people who died were members of a family of Kyrgyz shepherds who had led their flocks up the mountain and spent the night in a rest hut, said Shi Chao, chairman of the Communist Party of Kransarike district.
Rescuers found the family of three, including a 6-year-old girl, and brought them down the mountain, but only the father survived, Ishi said.
The town is replacing the huts with sturdier structures, with some help from the government. The third death occurred elsewhere in Akchi province.
The prefecture dispatched more than 2,300 rescue workers, and Akchi prefecture evacuated 7,338 residents. A total of 12,426 people were evacuated.
Emergency survival equipment such as coats and tents arrived to help thousands of people who had been evacuated from their homes as rescue workers searched through the rubble.
“This 7.1 rating is very strong, but the casualty situation is not serious,” Zhang Yongjiu, director of the Xinjiang Earthquake Management Bureau, said at a press conference.
The epicenter of the quake was in a mountainous area about 3,000 meters (9,800 feet) above sea level, Zhang said.
In Yamansu district, about 115 people were staying at a Communist Party meeting hall on Wednesday morning, with bedding neatly rolled up on five rows of long metal bed frames. Medical staff were on hand to check on the elderly resident.
Grandma was feeding one of her grandchildren on one of the beds, while the older grandma was sipping instant noodles.
Outside, men were talking around a large metal woodstove with a stovepipe, two wearing chef’s hats. Chunks of meat and vegetables in large plastic and metal containers sat on his two weathered desks set up outside.
Although temperatures were well below freezing, a light layer of snow covered the frozen ground as the sun brought people outside.
The earthquake occurred just after 2 a.m. Tuesday. By evening, authorities said three people were dead and five injured, two seriously.
As of 8 a.m. Wednesday, 1,104 aftershocks were recorded, including five with a magnitude of 5.0 or higher, according to state broadcaster CCTV. The largest was recorded at magnitude 5.7.
The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region government posted on its official social media account Weibo on Tuesday that 47 homes among the damaged buildings had collapsed.
Officials said most of the destroyed houses were in remote areas and were built by residents. New public housing built by the government did not collapse.
In Yamans, most of the damage was to the animal shelter and the exterior walls of the property, which were made of cement-covered bricks and were not as sturdy as the house. Some homes sustained minor damage, and residents in the worst-hit areas were told to remain in evacuation centers until authorities complete inspections.
CCTV footage showed station staff at Aksu station quickly and without panic ordering passengers to leave the waiting area.
Temperatures well below freezing have been recorded in the mountainous Uquturfan province, with the China Meteorological Administration predicting a low of -18 degrees Celsius (below zero Fahrenheit) this week.
According to Xinjiang authorities, the population of the prefecture was approximately 233,000 as of 2022.
According to Aksu city authorities, the earthquake knocked out power lines, but electricity was quickly restored. As a result of a safety inspection, the Urumqi Railway Bureau confirmed that there were no problems with the line, and operations resumed just after 7 a.m. The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region Capital Bureau announced on its official Weibo account that 23 trains were affected by the suspension.
The region’s strongest quake in a century was also magnitude 7.1 and occurred in 1978 about 200 kilometers (124 miles) north of Tuesday’s epicenter, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
The shaking was felt hundreds of kilometers away.
The tremors were reportedly felt in neighboring Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, and as far away as New Delhi. Videos posted on the Telegram messaging platform show people running downstairs of apartment buildings and standing on the street in the Kazakh city of Almaty, some of them short-circuited in freezing weather. Some people were wearing pants.
Classes have been canceled in Xinjiang and Kazakhstan to help children recover from the shock.
Earthquakes occur frequently in western China.
A magnitude 6.2 earthquake that struck Gansu province in December killed 151 people, making it China’s deadliest earthquake in nine years. The 2008 earthquake in Sichuan province killed nearly 90,000 people.
Authorities on Tuesday raised the confirmed death toll in a landslide in a remote mountainous region of southwestern China’s Yunnan province to 31, Chinese state media reported.
The disaster occurred in the mountain village of Liangshui just before 6 a.m. on Monday. Authorities announced Tuesday that a total of 44 people were found missing or dead.