TIBET, China
A strong earthquake killed at least 53 people in Tibet on Tuesday and left many others trapped as dozens of aftershocks shook the region of western China and across the border in Nepal.
The official Xinhua News
Agency said 62 other people were injured, citing the regional disaster relief
headquarters.
About 1,500 fire and rescue
workers were deployed to search for people in the rubble, the Ministry of
Emergency Management said.
The U.S. Geological Survey
said the earthquake measured magnitude 7.1 and was relatively shallow at a
depth of about 10 kilometres (6 miles). China recorded the magnitude as 6.8.
The epicentre was about 75 kilometres (50 miles) northeast of Mount Everest, which straddles the border. The area is seismically active and is where the Indian and Eurasia plates clash and cause uplifts in the Himalayan mountains strong enough to change the heights of some of the world’s tallest peaks.
The average altitude in the
area around the epicentre is about 4,200 meters (13,800 feet), the China
Earthquake Networks Center said in a social media post.
State broadcaster CCTV said
there are a handful of communities within 5 kilometres (3 miles) of the
epicentre, which was 380 kilometres (240 miles) from Lhasa, the capital of
Tibet, and about 23 kilometres (14 miles) from the region’s second-largest city
of Shigatse, known as Xigaze in Chinese.
About 230 kilometres (140
miles) away in Nepal’s capital, Kathmandu, the earthquake woke up residents and
sent them running out of their homes into the streets. No information was
immediately available from the remote, mountainous areas of Nepal closer to the
epicentre.
There have been 10 earthquakes
of at least magnitude 6 in the area where Tuesday’s quake hit over the past
century, the USGS said.
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