At least 14,500 survivors from areas including Wenchuan County, the epicenter of Monday's devastating earthquake in southwest China's Sichuan Province, have been evacuated or provided with temporary shelter, officials said.
More than 500 residents of Yingxiu, a township in Wenchuan, have been organized to leave for Dujiangyan City to seek further medical treatment or housing. They will travel via a temporary ferry service on the Zipingpu Reservoir.
Among them are 200 students and teachers from Xuankou Middle School in the town seat of Yingxiu, which had virtually no access after quake-triggered landslides blocked the paved road in the mountains.
Several buildings at the Xuankou school, with more than 1,000 students and faculty members, were razed to the ground in the quake.
With help of rescuers from the Sichuan Provincial Mountaineers Association, the students and teachers, as well as the teachers' families, were escorted to the ferry service at 8 a.m. on Friday. They had to travel on foot for more than 90 minutes.
Hao Shichang, director of the education department of the Tibetan-Qiang Autonomous Prefectural Government of Aba, who was at the pier to oversee the evacuation, decided to lead able-bodied students and teachers to trek 30 kilometers through the mountainous paths to Dujiangyan.
"We are running short of food, water and medicine, so we should let those who are ill or injured travel by boat," said Hao. He said that the ferries' capacity was very limited, mostly to a dozen people per trip.
To the east, Pengzhou, a county-level city that falls under the jurisdiction of Chengdu, the provincial capital, is one of the worst-hit areas. Most of townships in Pengzhou lie deep among tall mountains.