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First body found in landslide in SW China
By Huang Zhiling and Wang Wei (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-08-10 08:05

CHENGDU: Rescuers have found the body of a victim missing from the massive landslide which took place in Shunhe township, Hanyuan county, in Southwest China's Sichuan province last Thursday night.

The body was found on Sunday morning near the Pubugou power station dam downstream of the landslide which killed at least two people, injured 18 and left 31 missing.

Zhou Jizheng, 40, a villager in Shimian county, Sichuan, was killed by the landslide when he was driving his truck from the Wusihe railway station in Hanyuan to Shimian, said Wang Yawen, chief of the Ya'an municipal emergency response office.

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The city of Ya'an has both Shimian and Hanyuan under its administration.

Some 2,000 rescuers were using motor boats in the Dadu River and walking along the river to look for the other 30 missing people, said Ya'an Party chief Xu Mengjia.

Most of the dead and missing were passengers who had taken the Beijing-Panzhihua railway to the Wusihe railway station on Thursday where they transferred to buses which were later caught in the landslide, he said.

The landslide damaged 10 automobiles and inundated 147 farmhouses and 118 hectares of farmland.

All the automobiles and passengers on provincial highway No 306 were pushed into the river by debris from the landslide, he said.

The debris formed a 250-m-long blockage on the Dadu River, resulting in the rise of the water level upstream and endangering people there.

Explosives experts had planned to blast off the debris into the river at 5 pm on Sunday. But they postponed the plan because a large rock on the mountain opposite the debris was likely to fall into the river at any time.