Quake rescuers find pregnant woman, her mother

From combined dispatches

DUJIANGYAN, China — Exhausted rescuers and earthquake victims celebrated yesterday when they pulled a woman who is eight months pregnant and her mother alive from the rubble of their home, a rare moment of joy in this shattered city.

But relatives were soon throwing themselves at the feet of the rescue chief as she withdrew her team with three family members still trapped in the wreckage.

Stories of hope and tragedy began to emerge as the toll from China’s deadliest earthquake in three decades climbed to nearly 15,000. Troops, firemen and civilians battled against time to save more than 25,000 people buried under rubble and mud.

Rescuers arrived for the first time in the epicenter of China’s massive earthquake, scouring flattened mountain villages for victims and distributing air-dropped supplies to survivors.

The official Xinhua news agency said about 2,000 soldiers were sent to repair “extremely dangerous” cracks in the Zipingpu Dam upriver from the earthquake-hit city of Dujiangyan.

China’s top economic-planning body said that the quake had damaged 391 dams, most of them small. He Biao, the director of a major relief center in northern Sichuan province, said there were concerns over other large dams close to the epicenter.

Help also began to arrive by helicopter and on foot in some of the hardest-to-reach areas, where some victims trapped for more than two days under collapsed buildings were still being pulled out alive. But the enormous scale of the devastation meant that resources were stretched thin, and makeshift aid stations and refugee centers were still springing up over a disaster area the size of Belgium.

In Dujiangyan, a city close to the quake’s epicenter, stricken relatives watched as firemen plucked Zhang Xiaoyan and her mother from the flattened remains of their six-story apartment block.

Mrs. Zhang and her mother were taken by stretcher to an ambulance and rushed to a hospital.

“We are very happy. We have been standing here shouting for two days,” said Pan Jianjun, a relative. “We are so grateful to the government and [Prime Minister] Wen Jiabao for their help.”

But most of the firefighters left with Mrs. Zhang.

A skeleton crew with a simple ladder promised to return with sniffer dogs, but the family’s predicament reflected the fate of many in this city, where rescuers are still in short supply despite a massive government mobilization.

“Please don’t go. Save them, save them,” shouted the weeping daughter of one of the three people the family said were still trapped alive.

Mr. Pan listed them as Mrs. Zhang’s in-laws and her husband’s grandmother.

Sun Guoli, the fire chief from the provincial capital, Chengdu, who oversaw the dramatic rescue, said Dujiangyan still badly needed aid, but said more firemen would return to the damaged building.

“We have promised, and we will do our best to get absolutely everyone out,” she said. “These people are all our brothers and sisters.”