Rescuers comb through a collapsed village house in Haidong city, Qinghai province on December 19, 2023.

The initial tremors lasted nearly 20 seconds and were felt in the provincial capital of Lanzhou 102 kilometers (63 miles) away, CCTV reported.

University students in Lanzhou shared photos on the social media site Weibo of crowds gathering outside their dormitories.

A student at Lanzhou University said when the quake struck, she first went to hide in the bathroom with her roommates, before running down 12 floors amid violent shakes.

“I’ve never felt such strong tremors,” she wrote in a Weibo post. “Wearing a down jacket, long underwear, and bare feet in slippers outdoors, where the temperature is lower than –10 degrees Celsius, (I’m) shivering with everyone.”

Some village homes in Gansu and Qinghai have collapsed into rubble, with firefighters pulling survivors out of the debris in the dark, footage from CCTV showed.

The quake has also cut off water and electricity supply as well as mobile signals in some areas, complicating rescue efforts.

At least 4,000 firefighters, police officers and soldiers have been dispatched to the disaster zone in Gansu, along with thousands of tents, folding beds, quilts and portable fire pits, according to provincial officials.

Bitter temperatures

In the epicenter of Jishishan, a county home to about 260,000 people, many rushed out of their homes to seek safety in open areas. Videos and images on state media and social media show families huddling together and wrapped in thick blankets on a public square.

A villager in Jishishan said she didn’t have time to put on extra clothes and ran out barefoot, rushing past bricks and glass shattered on the ground.

“There was a loud ‘boom’ and the wall on the second floor collapsed. (I was) nearly hit and trapped inside,” the villager told Jiupai News, a news site affiliated with the state-run Changjiang Daily.

Authorities have set up tents at a temporary resettlement site on a square in Dahejia, a hard-hit town in Jishishan county, CCTV reported.

The lowest temperature in Jishishan was -14 degrees Celsius, or 6.8 degrees Fahrenheit, overnight, according to CCTV.

The below-freezing temperatures pose the “biggest challenge” to rescue efforts, Wang Duo, an expert involved in the rescue, told the state-run outlet China Newsweek. The first 72 hours are usually considered the “golden period” for rescue, but that precious time window is shortened in this case due to the biting cold, Wang said.

Large swathes of China, including its northwest, have been gripped by a sudden cold snap in recent days, with temperatures plunging to near historic lows in some

Chinese Xi Jinping on Tuesday urged authorities to “make all-out efforts” to search for survivors and treat the injured, noting that the disaster took place in a high-altitude area with cold weather, according to Xinhua.

China’s Finance Ministry and Emergency Management Ministry allocated 200 million yuan ($28 million) in natural disaster relief funds to the two provinces hit by the quake, Xinhua reported.

China is no stranger to powerful earthquakes, especially in southwestern parts of the country where the Eurasian tectonic plate meets the Indian plate, a dramatic collision that creates the mighty Himalayas and the vast Tibetan plateau.

The quake is the deadliest to have hit China in nearly a decade, according to publicly available reports, since an earthquake in the southwestern province of Yunnan killed around 600 people in 2014.

Yunnan’s neighboring province, Sichuan, witnessed a devastating magnitude 7.9 earthquake in 2008 that killed some 90,000 people.