A strong earthquake killed at least 46 people, triggered landslides and shook residents in a major city under lockdown in southwestern China on Monday, state media reported.
Chinese state broadcaster CCTV said that 17 people died in Ya'an city, while 29 deaths were reported in neighboring Ganzi Prefecture.
"Another 16 people were missing and 50 were injured," CCTV said late Monday.
The 6.8 magnitude earthquake struck a mountainous area in Luding shortly after noon, the China Earthquake Networks Center said.
Sichuan, which sits on the edge of the Tibetan Plateau where tectonic plates meet, is regularly hit by earthquakes. Two quakes in June killed at least four people.
Authorities reported seven deaths, landslides and damage to homes and power interruptions, state broadcaster CCTV said. One landslide blocked a rural highway, leaving it strewn with rocks, the Ministry of Emergency Management said.
A total of 39,000 people live within a 20-kilometer (12.5-mile) radius of the epicenter and 1.55 million within a 100-kilometer radius, according to state television.
The quake was Sichuan's biggest since August 2017, when a magnitude 7.0 quake hit Aba prefecture.
The 6.6 magnitude earthquake was centered at a depth of 10 kilometers (6 miles), according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Preliminary measurements by different agencies often differ slightly. Shallower quakes tend to cause more damage.
Sichuan, which sits on the edge of the Tibetan plateau where tectonic plates meet, is regularly hit by earthquakes. Two quakes in June killed at least four people.
Earthquakes are fairly common in China, especially in the country's seismically active southwest. China’s deadliest earthquake in recent years was a 7.9 magnitude quake in 2008 that killed nearly 90,000 people in Sichuan. The temblor devastated towns, schools and rural communities outside the provincial capital of Chengdu, leading to a yearslong effort to rebuild with more resistant materials.
An aftershock of a magnitude of 4.2 struck the city of Yaan, about 100 kilometers southwest of Chengdu, minutes later.
The epicenter of the most recent quake is in a mountainous area about 200 kilometers southwest of Chengdu, which is currently under a COVID-19 lockdown and the megacity of Chongqing. The region has also suffered a summer of extreme weather, with a record-breaking heat wave noticeably drying rivers in Chongqing.
