At least 175 killed in SW China quake

At least 175 people were killed and 1,300 injured after a strong earthquake hit southwest China's mountainous Yunnan province Sunday, state media said. The quake in Zhaotong prefecture, in the province's northeast, toppled buildings and left residents frantically searching for survivors beneath the rubble, images on social media showed. ‘At least 150 people were killed,’ the official news agency reported. ‘Too many buildings were damaged and we are collecting data on deaths and injuries,’ Xinhua quoted a local official as saying from the township of Longtoushan, at the epicentre of the quake.China News Service, the country's second state news agency, said more than 1,300 people had been injured and 12,000 houses had collapsed. ‘The walls of several buildings crumbled, and water pipes were ruptured. The electricity was cut off,’ wrote a user who said they lived in Ludian county, 23 kilometres (14 miles) from the epicentre, on China's Twitter-like Weibo. Ludian has a population of 265,900, and sits more than 300 kilometres (185 miles) from the provincial capital of Kunming. Zhaotong City, the capital of the prefecture, dispatched more than 300 police and firefighters to the quake-hit areas. The province also sent 392 rescuers and sniffer dogs. USGS reported the quake at a magnitude of 6.1 and said it struck at a relatively shallow depth of 10 kilometres at 4:30 pm (0830 GMT), according to AFP.