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DUJIANGYAN, China: Foreign rescue teams arrived in
China’s quake-devastated southwest on Friday, loaded with
specialist equipment to aid the desperate search among the rubble of
shattered buildings.
A Japanese team began work in
Sichuan province, the first time the Chinese government has accepted
foreign professionals for a domestic disaster rescue and relief
operation.
But experts warned that time was
running out, as one British search and rescue team struggled to get
permission to enter China from Hong Kong.
A team of 31 Japanese rescuers,
accompanied by sniff dogs, arrived Friday in the town of Guanzhuang
of Qingchuan county, an isolated area near the mountainous border
with Gansu province where 700 people are believed buried.
“We want to do our best to
rescue as many people as possible,” a member of the rescue team
told Japan’s TV Asahi network when they arrived in Sichuan.
Japanese television showed
footage of the group arriving later in Qingchuan and holding talks
with their Chinese counterparts on how to divide up the work.
A second batch of 29 emergency
firefighters, police and coast guard workers left Japan for China on
Friday.
“Needless to say, time is
running out. We want to speed up our efforts to save people’s
lives with cooperation with the Chinese side,” a foreign ministry
official said in Tokyo.
Teams from South Korea, Singapore
and Russia have also been granted access to the region, alongside
teams from Hong Kong and separately governed Taiwan, which China
still considers part of its territory.
The 41 rescuers from South
Korea’s National Emergency Management Agency left Seoul on Friday,
along with two sniff dogs and “state-of-the-art” search
technology.
Their equipment includes digital
endoscope cameras that can be inserted into building cracks to seek
out any survivors, the agency said in a statement.
The Singapore team brought along
life-detector systems and hydraulic cutters and spreaders, it said.
The decision to accept the
rescuers signals an apparent shift by Beijing, which initially had
politely rebuffed such offers despite clearly struggling to reach
many devastated communities cut off by quake-damaged roads.
In previous disasters, such as
the Tangshan earthquake of 1976 which killed more than 240,000
people, China even refused offers of aid from abroad, insisting the
money was more needed elsewhere.
--AFP
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