Beijing: Relief troops walked hours over rock, debris and mud in hopes of reaching the worst-hit area of an earthquake that rocked central China on Monday, killing nearly 10,000 people, state-run media reported.

Setting out from Maerkang in Sichuan Province at 8 pm on Monday, the 100 or so troops had to travel 200 kilometers (124 miles) to go before reaching Wenchuan, the epicenter of the quake, also in the province, Xinhua reported. After seven hours, they still had 70 kilometers (43 miles) to go.

"I have seen many collapsed civilian houses, and the rocks dropped from mountains on the roadside are everywhere," the head of the unit, Li Zaiyuan, told Xinhua.

Added CNN Correspondent John Vause: "The roads here are terrible in the best of times … right now they’re down right atrocious. They’ve resorted to going in one man at a time on foot."

Nearly all the confirmed deaths were in Sichuan Province, but rescuers were hindered because roads linking it to the provincial capital, Chengdu, were damaged, Xinhua reported.

Local radio quoted disaster relief officials as saying a third of the buildings in Wenchuan collapsed from the quake and another third were seriously damaged.

The earthquake was powerful enough to be felt throughout most of China. Many children were buried under the rubble of their schools. The Chinese government said the death toll was sure to rise.

An expert told CNN the 7.9-magnitude quake at about 2:28 p.m. Monday (6:28 a.m. GMT) was the largest the region has seen "for over a generation."

Residents as far as Chongqing — about 200 miles from the epicenter in Sichuan Province — spent the night outdoors, too afraid of aftershocks to sleep indoors.

Local radio in Sichuan quoted disaster relief officials as saying a third of the buildings in Wenchuan collapsed from the quake and another third were seriously damaged.

The state-run Zhongxin news agency reported that a survivor who escaped Beichuan county in Sichuan Province described the province as having been "razed to the ground."

The Red Cross Society of China, coordinating some of the international aid efforts, encouraged financial donations because of the difficulty of getting supplies to those most in need.

At least six schools collapsed to some extent in the quake or aftershocks that followed, Xinhua reported.

At one school, almost 900 students — all eighth-graders and ninth-graders, according to a local villager — were believed to be buried.

At least 50 bodies were pulled from the rubble by Monday night at Juyuan Middle School in Juyuan Township of Dujiangyan City, Sichuan Province, Xinhua reported.

"Some buried teenagers were struggling to free themselves from the ruins while others were calling for help. Eight excavators were working at the site. Devastated parents watched as five cranes worked at the site and an ambulance waited," Xinhua reported.

"A tearful mother said her son, ninth-grader Zhang Chengwei, was buried in the ruins."

Meanwhile, 2,300 people were buried in two collapsed chemical plants in Sichuan’s Shifang city, and 80 tons of ammonia leaked out, Xinhua reported. Six hundred people died there. The plants were among a series of buildings that collapsed, including private homes, schools and factories.

The local government has evacuated 6,000 civilians from the area and was dispatching firefighters to help at the scene, Xinhua reported.

Much of the nation’s transportation system shut down. Xinhua reported there were "multiple landslides and collapses along railway lines" near Chengdu.

Sichuan Province sits in the Sichuan basin and is surrounded by the Himalayas to the west. The Yangtze River flows through the province and the Three Gorges Dam in the nearby Hubei Province controls flooding to the Sichuan — though there were no reports of damage to the world’s largest dam.

Monday’s quake was caused by the Tibetan plateau colliding with the Sichuan basin, Zhigang Peng, an earthquake expert at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia, told media.
Source: CNN