China: Time for miracles is running out

BEICHUAN, CHINA - Piles of broken concrete rise seven stories high, and a few buildings stand askew, knocked at odd angles. People cry out the names of missing relatives and rescue workers shout, "Is anyone there? Is anyone there?"

In what seemed a miraculous tale of survival four days after a powerful earthquake devastated a mountainous region of southwest China, the answers came in faint taps on concrete or muffled cries.

In response to one such muffled call, five volunteers dug with their hands and shovels for more than four hours on Friday, freeing a middle-aged woman from a crumpled apartment building.

The woman, who was too weak to speak, was followed by another -- and another. In all, 33 people were pulled from the rubble in Beichuan, the government said, and they were rushed away on stretchers -- bruised, bleeding and covered in dust -- about 100 hours after the massive quake.

But the time for miracles is running out.

The death toll in the country's worst natural disaster in 30 years passed 22,000 on Friday evening, and the government estimates that the figure could climb to 50,000.

The government said Friday that it had deployed more than 130,000 military and relief workers in devastated parts of Sichuan Province, where thousands are still believed to be buried in the ruins and where perhaps 100,000 people or more have been left homeless.

More than 4 million apartments and homes were damaged or destroyed in Sichuan, Housing Minister Jiang Weixin said.

Augmenting the relief effort, specialized rescue teams from Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Russia arrived in the region and began work -- the first time ever that China has accepted outside help. The United States agreed to provide Chinese authorities with satellite images of the earthquake zone and two planeloads of relief supplies

Rescue efforts have been hampered all week long by bad weather, treacherous mountain terrain and thousands of aftershocks, undoing hard-fought rescue work.

The government said it was also investigating why so many school buildings fell, killing as many as 7,000 students and teachers.

In Wufu, a farming village two hours north of the Sichuan provincial capital of Chengdu, most of the dead students were a couple's only child -- born under a policy launched in the late 1970s to limit many families to one offspring.

The loss is intensified for those with no other offspring to lavish with care and affection.

Bi Kaiwei and his wife, Meilin, stopped having children after their daughter was born, taking to heart the one-child policy and its slogan: "Have fewer kids, live better lives."

"She died before becoming even a young adult," said Bi, standing beside the grave of 13-year-old Yuexing. "She never really knew what life was like."