More than 500 people have been killed and thousands wounded or made homeless by the 7.1-level earthquake that struck China’s Qinghai province today.
The epicenter was in Yushu, which is a Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture within Qinghai. It is also nearly 4,000 meters above sea-level, so even flying planes in there is complicated, given how thin the air is.
More information is here.
The Chinese state seems to be reacting just about as effectively as any state this massive, faced with such varying levels of economic development could react. It did pretty well in response to that last mega-quake, the Sichuan Quake of May 2008, which killed around 70,000 people. (There’s a good Wikipedia page on that one.)
The big contrast, sadly, is with the effects of January’s quake in Haiti, whose government had nothing like the administrative capacity to respond in a maximally life-saving manner.
Anyway, my thoughts are with the peoples of Yushu, Qinghai, and China in general as they all grapple with with this latest crisis.