“China will relocate more than 12 million people made homeless by the country’s deadliest earthquake in 32 years as the threat of rain heightened concern about mudslides and the spread of disease.

The May 12 temblor destroyed 5.4 million homes and damaged another 21.4 million, the Ministry of Civil Affairs said today in Beijing. As of 6 p.m., 40,075 people had died and 247,645 had been injured, the official Xinhua News Agency reported, citing the State Council, China’s cabinet.”

source: Bloomberg

The earthquake displaced 12.4 million people, including 5 million made permanently homeless. Officials want to house people in shelters to prevent the spread of disease with the onset of the rainy season in Sichuan, the worst hit region, and surrounding provinces. The government appealed to overseas donors to make sending tents a priority. Officials fear torrential rain may also spark mudslides.

“We are encouraging people affected to seek shelter with relatives and friends,” Jiang Li, vice minister at the Ministry of Civil Affairs, said at a Beijing news briefing today. The government is also planning to open public venues to resettle people “and this is where we need huge numbers of tents,” she said.

More than 278,000 tents have been sent to the earthquake zone and the government has ordered 700,000 more, Li said. Foldable beds, crockery and gas canisters are also needed. As many as 3 million tents are needed in Sichuan, Li said.

Foreign Medical Teams

The United Nations Children’s Fund, Unicef, flew in tents, along with other relief supplies, on two military planes that landed late yesterday in Chengdu, Sichuan’s capital, about 1,500 kilometers (932 miles) southwest of Beijing, Xinhua said earlier. Medical teams from Japan, Germany, Italy and Russia are also arriving to help treat the wounded, who number 245,963, according to figures released by the ministry today.

The government has received 12.52 billion yuan ($1.8 billion) worth of donations, the ministry said.

Orphans and elderly people who lost relatives in the quake and haven’t any one to support them will get a monthly allowance of 600 yuan ($85.98) a month for the next three months, Jiang said. The finance ministry has allocated 2.5 billion yuan in emergency aid, she said.

The central government is shipping 384,000 tons of grain from its reserves to Sichuan province to feed survivors, who were warned not to drink water away from the rubble to avoid contamination.

No outbreaks of disease or other health threats have been reported as of 9 p.m. last night, state-run Xinhua News Agency said today.

Mud Slides

As much as 30 millimeters (1.2 inches) of rain may fall in Wenchuan and Beichuan, two cities close to the epicenter, the China Meteorological Administration said in the latest forecast on its Web site.

“Mudslides are the biggest worry for now amid the torrential rain because the ground has already been destabilized,” said the Civil Affairs Ministry’s Jiang.

Residents of Chengdu and other cities and towns fled their homes late yesterday after provincial seismologists warned of an aftershock as strong as magnitude 7, Xinhua reported.

A 5.2-magnitude quake shook the area at 1:52 a.m. local time today, according to the U.S. Geological Survey’s Web site. The aftershocks are bringing debris down in mountainous areas near the quake’s epicenter, disrupting relief work and terrifying those sheltering outside.

Another survivor was found today, almost 179 hours after the quake. Rescuers took 30 hours to pull Ma Yuangjiang, 31, from the rubble in Wenchuan county near the epicenter of the quake, Xinhua said. Ma was able to speak after being rescued.

Survivors

One of three people brought out alive yesterday has died, Xinhua reported. Wang Fazhen, a 50-year-old woman, was found in the ruins of a coal mine about 164 hours after the quake. She died on the way to the hospital, the news agency said later.

A 23-member Japanese medical team is heading for the quake zone today, Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda’s office said in a statement sent by e-mail.

A team of rescue workers sent by Japan last week is returning home as hope fades for survivors under the rubble and work turns to recovery and reconstruction.

Soldiers are carrying bags of disinfectant rather than digging equipment in the devastated areas, in a sign the search for survivors is winding down.

Sichuan’s vice governor Li said he has sent 868 tons of disinfectant to the quake zone, where 34.7 million square meters (41.6 million square yards) have been disinfected.

Rising temperatures are causing corpses to decay faster and allowing bacteria to multiply, the Duijiangyan area’s relief commander Zhang Pu said.

Strongest Quake

The May 12 earthquake was the most powerful to hit China, the world’s most populous country with 1.3 billion people, since a magnitude-8.6 quake struck Tibet in 1950, killing 1,526 people. A 7.5-magnitude temblor in Tangshan in the northeast killed 250,000 in 1976, according to the USGS.

China’s seismology department said last week’s quake had a magnitude of 8.

China ground to a halt for three minutes yesterday as cars, trains and ships sounded their horns in a “wail of grief” to mourn the dead. Flags flew at half-staff and the country stopped at 2:28 p.m. Beijing time for a period of reflection as thousands gathered in the city’s Tiananmen Square and stock trading halted in Shanghai and Shenzhen.