Almost 5 million Chinese homeless after quake: officials

Nearly five million people have been left homeless by a deadly earthquake that devastated China's southwest region four days ago, killing more than 22,000 people, Chinese officials said Friday.

The Chinese government estimates that 10 million people have been directly affected by Monday's 7.9-magnitude quake, with four million homes and apartment shattered, many near the epicentre in the Beichuan county of Sichuan province.

Meanwhile Friday, rescuers pulled a woman from beneath the rubble who had been trapped since Monday, as a strong new aftershock shook the region near the epicentre, the official Xinhua news agency reported. 

The woman, a nurse, was rescued from the debris of a clinic in Beichuan county, Xinhua said. People heard sounds coming from the ruins and used their hands and shovels to dig for more than four hours.

She was taken to receive medical treatment, the report said.

"She had the will to live," said Xu Tao, one of the volunteers who helped rescue the woman. "I'm just exhausted."

Earlier in the day, rescuers freed a girl who had been trapped for 80 hours in a collapsed school in central China.

The rescues coincided with an aftershock that rumbled through the area near the epicentre, triggering landslides and knocking out communications in some parts of the rescue zone. It's not known if anyone was injured, but officials said several vehicles were buried. Measuring magnitude 5.5, it was one of the strongest of dozens of aftershocks that have shaken the region.

Chinese officials said mobile phone service would be restored and roads unblocked within hours.

Hotels swept away

With the official death toll at more than 22,000, an air force unit reached Yinchanggou, a scenic spot in the mountains north of the Sichuan provincial capital of Chengdu, where it found landslides had swept away rustic small hotels.

"There are several hundred hotels, including farmer homestays, probably 800 in all. They are all rubble now," Cai Weisu, an official with an air force unit from the Chengdu Military Region, told Sichuan Television. Most of the dead are tourists, he said, but he did not identify whether they were foreigners or Chinese.

The Chinese government has said the death toll will likely hit 50,000 as tens of thousands of people are still believed to be trapped under the rubble in Sichuan province alone.

But deputy health minister Gao Qiang said China will continue its unrelenting fight to find survivors. More than 100,000 soldiers, police officers and volunteers are picking through the rubble around the clock.

"We will never give up hope," Gao told reporters in Beijing. "For every thread of hope, our efforts will increase a hundredfold. We will never give up."

Chinese President Hu Jintao arrived Friday in Sichuan, the province hardest hit by the earthquake, and reiterated his government's commitment to survivors.

"We must make every effort, race against time and overcome all difficulties to achieve the final victory of the relief efforts," said Hu, who is meeting with some of the rescue teams that have been trying to locate victims.

Earthquake survivor Xiao Yi Li told CBC News that she feels grateful she and her family didn't get trapped under rubble as so many others in her neighbourhood near Chengdu did.

When the earthquake struck, she was on her way to school. As soon as she realized what had happened, she kicked off her high heels and starting running towards her home to make sure her parents and grandparents were OK.

She found her neighbourhood covered in debris, dead bodies and blood everywhere, but miraculously her apartment building was still standing, although badly damaged, and her family was safe.

"Now that I've been through such a big disaster I don't think I will be afraid of any difficulties in my life any more," she said. "This is such a big lesson for me to realize how life is so important."

Rescuers get access to hardest-hit areas

The rescue efforts have been inching further into regions that have been completely isolated because of damaged roads, collapsed bridges and piles of debris. Rescuers now say they have made headway in all 58 counties and townships affected by the quake, including Wenchuan, the county in northwest Sichuan where the epicentre of the quake was located.

Officials are pleading for donations of heavy equipment, including 100 cranes, to help rescuers sift through the rubble in all these regions. 

Foreign governments have been sending in highly specialized teams of rescuers, equipped with sniffer dogs and high-tech sonic detection equipment, to help China with the search. Countries and territories coming to China's assistance include those who have had tense relations with China in the past, like Taiwan and Japan.

More than $125 million US in supplies and cash have been sent to earthquake-affected areas.

Médecins Sans Frontières, the Red Cross and other relief organizations have been working in area, with the Red Cross appealing for donations to cover costs of medicine, food, water and tents.

At least 100,000 people are coping with injuries sustained during the quake.

Survivors are struggling to find clean drinking water, food and shelter. They are also coping with heavy rains, which China's Land and Resources Ministry says could continue for the next few days, potentially triggering major landslides.

Even those with homes still standing are afraid to enter them for fear they might still collapse in an aftershock or because of structural damage done during the quake. Survivors have been sleeping in makeshift tents and under plastic tarps since Monday.

Investigating why 6,900 schools collapsed

Meanwhile, an estimated 6,900 schools collapsed or were damaged during the quake, which has parents voicing concerns that the schools weren't built to code. The CBC's Michel Cormier, reporting from Chengdu, said in one town, all buildings were left standing except the school, which collapsed.

China says it will launch an investigation into the concerns.

"I am very saddened by the deaths of students," Reuters reported Jiang Weixin, Minister of Housing and Urban-Rural Construction, saying. "If investigations show that is the case, it must be dealt with seriously."

He would not say whether he believed a disproportionate amount of schools had collapsed, but he conceded that corner-cutting may have played a part.

"At this stage we also cannot rule out the possibility that there may have been shoddy work and inferior materials during the construction of some school buildings," Jiang said.

Struggling to bury the bodies

So far, there have been no outbreaks of water-borne diseases, but health workers fear there could be problems in the near future. They are taking preventative measures — inoculating survivors, getting survivors access to safe drinking water and finding ways to dispose of the rising number of corpses that could contaminate water supplies.

In the town of Luoshui, soldiers dug large burial pits, while crematoriums were running 24 hours a day in other areas. Workers were running out of body bags to wrap up the dead.

China's Health Ministry has been encouraging people on its website to clean bodies on the spot where they are found and get them buried or cremated as quickly as possible. An estimated 12,300 bodies still need to be buried in Sichuan.

"The morgues and the hospitals are full now; people just don’t know where to put them," the CBC's Cormier said.