Chinese village buried in landslide

BEIJING — More than 120 people were buried by a landslide that caused huge rocks and a mass of earth to come crashing into their homes in a mountain village in southwestern China early yesterday, officials said.

The landslide, which came from a mountain, engulfed a cluster of 62 homes and a hotel in the village of Xinmo in Mao County at about 6 a.m., the Sichuan provincial government said. Officials said a mile of road were buried in the disaster.

“It’s the biggest landslide to hit this area since the Wenchuan earthquake,” Wang Yongbo, an official leading one of the rescue efforts, told state broadcaster China Central Television. Wang was referring to China’s deadliest earthquake this century, a magnitude 7.9 temblor that struck Sichuan province in May 2008, killing nearly 90,000 people.

The provincial government said more than 120 people were buried by the landslide. CCTV cited a rescuer as saying five bodies had been found.

Rescuers pulled out three people, two of whom had survived, the official Sichuan Daily newspaper said on its microblog. The paper also said a family of three, including a monthold baby, managed to escape just as the landslide started to hit their house.

Mao County, or Maoxian, sits on the eastern margin of the Tibetan plateau and is home to about 110,000 people, according to the government’s website.

The provincial government said on its website that an estimated 282 million cubic feet of earth and rock — equivalent to more than 3,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools — had slid down the mountain.