Beijing – A powerful earthquake killed at least 53 people in Tibet on Tuesday and left many others stranded as a series of aftershocks rattled the region in western China and across the border in Nepal.
An official Xinhua News Agency said another 62 people were injured, citing the regional disaster relief headquarters.
About 1,500 firefighters and rescuers have been assigned to search for people in the rubble, said the Department of Emergency Management.
The US Geological Survey said the earthquake was measured at 7.1 magnitude and was as shallow as six miles. China recorded the maximum as 6.8.
The worst incident was about 50 kilometers northeast of Mt. Everest, crossing the border. This area is seismically active and is where the Indian and Eurasian plates collide and create the Himalayan mountain range that is strong enough to change the height of some of the world’s tallest peaks.
The average elevation in the area surrounding the earthquake is 13,800 meters, the China Earthquake Networks Center said in a social media post.
State broadcaster CCTV said there were a number of communities three kilometers away from the massacre, which was 240 kilometers from Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, and 14 miles from the region’s second-largest city Shigatse, known as Xigaze in Chinese.
At a distance of about 140 kilometers from the capital of Nepal, Kathmandu, the earthquake woke up the residents and forced them out of their houses and into the streets. No information was immediately available from remote, mountainous areas of Nepal close to the base.
There have been 10 earthquakes of at least magnitude 6 in the area where Tuesday’s quake struck in the past 100 years, the USGS said.
Associated Press writer Binaj Gurubacharya in Kathmandu, Nepal, and researcher Yu Bing in Beijing contributed to this report.
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