People evacuate to an open-air parking area in Chongqing (China).

BEIJING: The death toll from the earthquake in a remote part of western China rose to 617, with 66 students and 10 teachers dying in school collapses that echo the country’s last major quake in 2008.

Thousands of survivors battled freezing temperatures overnight with scant shelter after a 6.9-magnitude temblor flattened the town of Jiegu in Qinghai province. As of 9 a.m. local time today 313 people were listed as missing and 9,110 injured, 970 of them seriously, the Xinhua News Agency reported.

Among the dead are children and teachers who died in demolished schools, Xinhua said. The collapse of classrooms in neighboring Sichuan province during a May 2008 earthquake sparked protests from grieving parents and accusations that corrupt officials ignored sub-standard construction practices. That 7.9-magnitude quake killed about 90,000 people.

Rescuers search the rubble of a collapsed building in Dujiangyan. The Chinese press agency Xinhua reports that the death toll has topped 10,000.

Hundreds more rescuers are set to arrive after a damaged airstrip reopened late yesterday, said a spokesman for the Qinghai government’s news department who would only give his surname, Zhang. The Ministry of Civil Affairs is sending 5,000 tents, 50,000 cotton coats and 50,000 quilts to the region, state-run Xinhua reported.

“China has more than enough supplies and is very well equipped to deal with a disaster of this size,” said Paul Conneally, a spokesman for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies in Geneva.

Rescue Efforts
Rescue teams saved more than 900 people from the debris of collapsed houses, Xinhua said. More than 85 percent of the homes were destroyed in Jiegu, an ethnic Tibetan area.

China Central Television showed residents digging through rubble with their hands. Others struggled through fire and smoke to reach people trapped under a collapsed hotel. Temperatures were forecast to drop as low as minus 3 degrees Celsius (26.6 degrees Fahrenheit) in the mountainous region on the Tibetan Plateau, more than 4,000 meters (13,123 feet) above sea level.

Electricity to the area has been cut, roads damaged and telecommunications disrupted. A local reservoir cracked, and workers are trying to prevent water flooding out, Xinhua said.

The Red Cross in China is helping the government with search and rescue and has provided thousands of relief tents, Conneally said in an interview. Taiwan, which has been governed separately from mainland China since 1949, is sending a 23- person search and rescue team to the area, Xinhua reported.

‘By Every Means’
Efforts “by every means” should be made to rescue those trapped, President Hu Jintao, who was at a summit meeting this week in Washington, and Premier Wen Jiabao, said in a statement posted on the central government’s Web site.

Getting supplies and heavy equipment to the area may be a challenge, said Rachel Wolff, a spokeswoman for World Vision, a Christian charity based near Seattle that works on disaster relief. World Vision is sending an assessment team to help children left homeless or orphaned by the quake.

A single road leading to the area is too narrow for large vehicles, Qinghai government’s Zhang said.

Authorities have dispatched several thousand rescue workers, police, firefighters, soldiers and medical workers to the quake zone, and Vice Premier Hui Liangyu flew in to oversee relief efforts. China Mobile Ltd., China Telecom Corp. and China Unicom Hong Kong Ltd. are working to restore phone connections, Xinhua reported.

President Barack Obama’s administration released a statement expressing condolences to the families of victims and offering help.

Girls’ Dormitory
At least one-third of the buildings at the Yushu Vocational School collapsed, including a girls’ dormitory and a multimedia center, Xinhua reported. Dozens of parents waited there for news about dozens of people believed to be trapped in the rubble.

“When the quake struck, the students had just finished their morning exercise. Most of them were having breakfast in the school canteen or cleaning their classrooms,” Xinhua quoted school principal Kunga Tenzin as saying. “Still, some were trapped in the dorms.”

Many of the buildings in the region, which has a significant ethnic-Tibetan population, are made of wood and mud, Xinhua said.

Ethic Tibetans and Uighurs, in neighboring Xinjiang province, complain that they are discriminated against by the majority Han Chinese and haven’t benefited from the country’s economic growth. Deadly clashes broke out in both regions in the past few years, undermining the central government’s main stated aim of ensuring social stability.

Aftershocks
The national earthquake center said there is a risk of “strong” secondary quakes in coming days. Four aftershocks with a magnitude of 4.8 or higher followed within four hours of the main quake, the U.S. Geological Survey said on its Web site.

The Ministry of Finance said it allocated 200 million yuan ($29 million) to deal with the aftermath of the quake.

Qinghai has a population of 5.57 million, making it among China’s smallest provinces. Its economy is only larger than Tibet’s and in land mass, the 721,000-square-kilometer province is bigger than Texas. Qinghai was used as a nuclear weapons testing site.