BEIJING, July 23 (Reuters) – The death toll from a landslide in the southwestern Chinese city of Chongqing last week has risen to 11, with 50 people still missing and 10 injured, Chinese state media reported on Thursday.
Following torrential rain on the morning of July 17, part of a mountainside collapsed in Pengshui County — an area famed for its scenic nature roughly 270 kilometres (167 miles) away from downtown Chongqing. Rock and debris fell on a cluster of riverside residential buildings and businesses downhill, causing them to collapse.
“After multiple rounds of life detection and search, no signs of life remain,” state-run Xinhua news agency said on Thursday. The onsite operation has entered the “in-depth rescue stage”, it said.
Specialised teams are still working to recover the remains of those unaccounted for, Xinhua said. The confirmed death toll from the collapse of the mountainside on July 17 previously stood at eight, with 34 reported missing.
Rescue teams had used explosives earlier this week to blast through heavy boulders hampering recovery efforts.
“Due to the large volume of collapsed material at the site, the large size and number of fallen boulders, the narrow operating space, and the poor slope stability, the rescue operation is extremely difficult,” state media said.
China is one of the most landslide-prone countries in the world. Over the past decade, a total of about 294 people have been killed nationwide in at least five major, deadly landslides.
The worst such incident killed more than 70 after the December 2015 collapse of a massive pile of construction debris at an industrial park in the southern tech hub of Shenzhen.
(Reporting by Xiuhao Chen, Yukun Zhang and Ryan Woo; Editing by Aidan Lewis)
