HANWANG, China -- For 50 agonizing hours, firefighters worked to free Zhang Xiaoyan, eight months pregnant, from under concrete slabs on the second floor of an earthquake-shattered building. They worked gingerly, fearing the rubble would shift and crush her.
Finally, a bulldozer raised its scoop five metres and the rescuers gently laid the 34-year-old woman inside and slowly lowered her to the ground -- to the cheers and applause of a group of spectators made homeless by Monday's quake.
Rescue workers carry an earthquake survivor from the ruins of a collapsed office building in Mianzhu, China.
The rescue in Dujiangyan was a rare moment of triumph Wednesday as nearly 26,000 people remained buried in collapsed buildings from the magnitude-7.9 earthquake in China. The death toll of almost 15,000 was expected to climb as relief operations spread into the mountains of Sichuan province.
Elsewhere, soldiers rushed to shore up a dam cracked by this week's powerful earthquake, and rescuers came by helicopter and boat Wednesday into the epicentre -- isolated by landslides -- but still were forced to dig for survivors with their bare hands.
Even as the rescue effort seemed to gather momentum, speeded by clearing weather after two days of rain, caring for tens of thousands of people made homeless across the disaster zone has stretched resources thin.
Homeless victims begged for aid on roadsides, and people settled in for a third night in a growing sprawl of refugee camps littered with garbage.
In Hanwang, a town in one of the hardest-hit counties, survivors stood hoping for handouts from cars, jostling with each other to reach one vehicle where a passenger passed bottled water out the window.
"I'm numb," said Zhao Xiaoli, a 25-year-old nurse working at a makeshift triage centre in tire-factory driveway. "The first day, hundreds of kids died when a school collapsed. The rest who came in had serious injuries. There was so little we could do for them."
Damage to the two-year-old Zipingpu Dam threatened downstream communities still digging out from the quake.
Some 2,000 soldiers were sent to the dam, the official Xinhua news agency said. Ten-centimetre cracks scarred the top of the dam, and landslides had poured down the surrounding hills, the business news magazine Caijing said on its website in a report from the scene.
Although the government pronounced the dam safe late Tuesday after an inspection, Caijing said its waters were being emptied to relieve pressure.
The activist group International Rivers Network was involved in a campaign in 2001 and 2002 to protest funding for the Zipingpu Dam because of its proximity to a fault line, said Aviva Imhoff, the group's campaigns director.
-- The Associated Press
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