Rescue efforts were underway to find victims buried in 18 separate houses
\nBEIJING
\nA landslide in southwestern China\u2019s mountainous Yunnan province early on Monday buried 47 people, killing at least two, and forced the evacuation of 200 more amid freezing temperatures and falling snow.
\nThe disaster struck just before 6 a.m. in the village of Liangshui in the northeastern part of Yunnan province. Rescue efforts were underway to find victims buried in 18 separate houses, the Zhenxiong county publicity department said.
\nTwo bodies were pulled from the rubble, according to state broadcaster CCTV. The cause of the landslide wasn\u2019t immediately known as survivors and rescuers struggled with snow and freezing temperatures that were forecast to persist for at least the next three days. Luo Dongmei, 35, was sleeping when the landslide struck, but she survived and was relocated to a school building by local authorities.
\n\u201cI was asleep, but my brother knocked on the door and woke me up. They said there was a landslide and the bed was shaking, so they rushed upstairs and woke us up,\u201d Luo said.
\nLuo, her husband and their three children, along with many other residents, have been provided with food at the school but are still waiting for blankets and other protection from the cold weather, she said.
\nLuo said she\u2019s been unable to contact her sister and aunt, who lived closer to the site of the landslide. \u201cThe only thing I can do is to wait,\u201d she said.
\nLast week, rescuers evacuated tourists from a remote skiing area in northwestern China where dozens of avalanches triggered by heavy snow had trapped more than 1,000 people for a week. The avalanches blocked roads, stranding both tourists and residents in a village in Altay prefecture in the Xinjiang region, close to China\u2019s border with Mongolia, Russia and Kazakhstan.
\nLandslides, often caused by rain or unsafe construction work, are not uncommon in China. At least 70 people were killed in landslides last year, including more than 50 at an open pit mine in China\u2019s Inner Mongolia region.
\nIn all, natural disasters in China left 691 people dead and missing and last year, causing direct economic losses of about 345 billion yuan ($48 billion, according to the National Commission for Disaster Reduction and the Ministry of Emergency Management. Meanwhile, the Ministry of Natural Resources enacted emergency response measures for geological disasters and sent a work team of experts to the site.
\nMinister of Emergency Management Wang Xiangxi has traveled to the landslide site to guide rescue operations, according to a statement from the ministry.
\nThe landslide in Yunnan also came just over a month after China\u2019s most powerful earthquake in years struck the northwest in a remote region between Gansu and Qinghai province. At least 149 people were killed in the magnitude 6.2 temblor that struck on Dec. 18, reducing homes to rubble and triggering heavy mudslides that inundated two villages in Qinghai province.
\nNearly 1,000 people were injured and more than 14,000 homes were destroyed in what was China\u2019s deadliest earthquake in nine years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Rescue efforts were underway to find victims buried in 18 separate houses BEIJING A landslide in southwestern China\u2019s mountainous Yunnan province early on Monday buried 47 people, killing at least two, and forced the evacuation of 200 more amid freezing temperatures and falling snow. The disaster struck just before 6 a.m. in the village of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":382471,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-382455","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"yoast_head":"\n