Quake hits Xinjiang rail route
Print Edition
Rail services were temporarily suspended after a 7.3-magnitude earthquake rocked a sparsely populated area of northwest China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region yesterday afternoon.
The Urumqi railway administration suspended a section from Hotan to Moyu on the Kahe Railway, which links Kashgar and Hotan, for safety reasons.
Some 531 passengers were left stranded at Moyu.
The earthquake struck Yutian County in the Hotan prefecture at 5:19pm, according to the China Earthquake Networks Center.
The tremor was 12 kilometers deep and hit about 270 kilometers east-southeast of Hotan in an extremely remote area.
Another tremor of 5.7 magnitude struck five minutes later, 5 kilometers deep, followed by a series of aftershocks of up to 4.2 magnitude, it said.
“We were at the office at the time and felt strong shaking, the windows were rattling,” a reporter in Keriya County near the epicentre told China Central Television.
He said few people lived in the mountainous area.
The civil affairs ministry said there had been no reports of casualties but it was likely some houses had been damaged, Xinhua news agency said.
CCTV said Hotan was not seriously affected, while several people in the city told reporters they felt less than a minute of shaking.
“It was not strong, there are no buildings collapsed,” one resident said.
An expert told CCTV that the affected area often experienced earthquakes but was thinly populated, so the impact was likely to be limited.
A 7.3-magnitude earthquake struck the county in March 2008, affecting 40,000 people and destroying 200 homes.
China is regularly hit by earthquakes, especially its mountainous western and southwestern regions.
A 6.6-magnitude earthquake in Sichuan Province in the southwest killed about 200 people last April, five years after almost 90,000 people died when a huge tremor struck the same province.
Twin 5.6 and 5.9-magnitude quakes killed at least 95 people in the northwest province of Gansu last July.
Xinjiang contains roughly 30 percent of China’s onshore oil and gas deposits and 40 percent of its coal.
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