Juyuan Middle School: 900 students buried, over 60 confirmed dead

As of 3 a.m. on Tuesday, rescuers had recovered more than 60 bodies from the debris of a high school building that collapsed and buried almost 900 students in Monday's earthquake in southwest China.

The tragedy occurred at around 2:30 p.m. at Juyuan Middle School in Juyuan Township of Dujiangyan City, Sichuan Province, about 100 kilometers from the epicenter in Wenchuan County.

Teachers and students of 24 classes were having classes then and most of them were buried in ruins, a teacher who only gave her surname as Cai told Xinhua.

Cai said the collapsed six-story building is home to the classrooms of the 8th- and 9th-graders.

Premier Wen Jiabao, who arrived in the provincial capital Chengdu by plane on Monday evening, visited the school site on Monday night.

Wen told the devastated parents, who were waiting for the news on their children in rain that the government would never give up rescue effort so long as there was hope for the trapped to survive.

"More than 1,000 people are participating rescue operation at the site now, and later, another 1,400 professional rescuers will arrive for help," said Wen.

"Some of the trapped still have chance to survive and we will go all out to rescue them," he said.

Rescuers told Xinhua they could still hear some buried students calling for help. Eight excavators and five cranes were brought in for rescue work and an ambulance waited.

"Dozens of rescued students have been sent to hospital," said a rescuer.

The collapse site was isolated by security line. On a black board erected at the school playground wrote the 28 names of the identified victims. Some 20 students, lowering their head in tears, stood quietly hand in hand nearby.

"We want to hold a vigil for the schoolmates passed away," said a student who declined to give his name.

A tearful mother said her son, 9th-grader Zhang Chengwei, was buried in the ruins.

Two girls said they escaped because they had "run faster than others".

"It was around 2:30 pm, and the building suddenly began to rock back and forth," one of them said.

"We ran out of the house when the quake hit," said Gao Shangyuan, a villager who lives close to the school and helped with the rescue work.

Gao and other villagers helped dozens of students out of the ruins. "Some had jumped out of the window and a few others ran down the stairs that did not collapse."

In addition, an unknown number of students were also reported buried after buildings collapsed at five other schools in the province's Deyang City, where a quake measuring 5.4 on the Richter scale occurred at 2:21 p.m. on Monday, according to the Sichuan provincial seismological bureau.

Local government officials are assessing the situation and rescuers are searching for the trapped students.

Deyang is about 58 kilometers from the provincial capital of Chengdu. Communications and the electricity supply in the quake-affected areas were cut after the quake.

Sichuan provincial education authorities have required schools and kindergartens in the quake-hit areas to close from Tuesday till further notice.

The quake, which measured 7.8 on the Richter scale and was felt in much part of the country, has killed more than 8,700 nationwide by Monday night.