Over 12,000 people are confirmed dead with countless thousands more unaccounted for after a devastating earthquake reduced a swath of south-western China to rubble earlier this week. The death toll is expected to soar as rescuers continue their grim task.

At least 8,530 died in Sichuan province and scores were killed in neighbouring regions when the 7.9 magnitude quake struck in the early afternoon Monday. The first rescuers, hampered by rockslides and rain, have only just managed to reach Wenchuan county, the epicentre of the quake, where 7,000 are feared dead.

Colleen Hua, national president of the Chinese Canadian National Council, said Canada’s Disaster Assistance Response Team (DART), a world-renowned rapid-response military unit, should immediately deploy to China.

"There are a large number of people missing and trapped in flattened buildings and a rapid response within 24-to-48 hours is necessary to be effective," Hua told the Post.

"Canada has rescue expertise and equipment in the Disaster Assistance Response Team and can make a difference in saving lives — we should offer to send an advance team immediately."

In areas that soldiers from the People’s Liberation Army were able to penetrate, the news is not good. In Mianyang, the second largest city in Sichuan province, 3,600 are dead and 18,640 buried in rubble, according to Xinhua, China’s official news agency. Over 16,000 Chinese troops are on the ground with another 35,000 enroute to the disaster zone, where entire apartment blocks have imploded and collapsed.

"China has very strong emergency capacity of its own," Keiran Green, spokesperson for CARE Canada told the Post Group. "But if China pleads for outside help, CARE Canada will help."

Among the structures that collapsed during this latest quake, the Juyuan Middle School building in Sichuan’s Dujiangyan city, where nearly 900 school children are reported to have been buried under metres of rubble.

In nearby Beichuan county between 3,000 and 5,000 people were feared dead after the earthquake caused 80 per cent of local buildings to collapse, China’s official Xinhua news agency reported.

The agency said officials also estimate that about 10,000 people were injured in Beichuan, which is about 100 km from the epicentre.

International organizations — already on standby in response to last week’s devastating cyclone in Burma, which is now believed to have claimed over 220,000 lives — are on standby around the world awaiting the green light to assist in these back-to-back, mass-scale human tragedies.

China’s earthquake struck at 2:28 p.m. and could be felt in cities hundreds of kilometres away, including Beijing and Bangkok.

A spokesman for the Sichuan provincial seismological bureau told Xinhua that "whole rows of houses" had collapsed in Dujiangyan city.

Several hundred workers were buried alive after two chemical plants collapsed in Sichuan’s Shifang city. Some 80 tonnes of toxic ammonia also leaked from the plants, forcing the evacuation of 6,000 residents.

"We urge the Canadian Government to be generous in pledging humanitarian aid to meet the immediate and long-term needs of the earthquake victims," said Hua, based in Toronto.

China’s government has declared a Grade One Emergency, the most serious category.

As Chinese rescuers in Dujiangyan city clear away the rubble from their schools, engineers and lawmakers in British Columbia are again turning their attention to how well B.C.’s schools would fare in a similar earthquake.

"It is sad that this has to happen to people before people start thinking about the risks of living in an earthquake country," said Ventura Carlos, the director of the Earthquake Engineering Research Facility at the University of B.C.

"It’s like buying insurance for your car - the government must decide how much it wants to spend in case there is an earthquake."

Carlos said that the provincial government should be taking steps to assess the costs of retro-fitting the 80 schools that need serious upgrades to mitigate structural damage from earthquakes in a region considered an quake hotspot.

Three years ago, Premier Gordon Campbell announced a $1.5 billion plan to upgrade 250 schools in the province over 15 years. Campbell also promised to fast-track the retro-fits of the 80 highest risk schools over the next three years.

But very little action has been taken, according to NDP MLA David Cubberly.

"Unfortunately, very little progress has been made on that promise to date," he said.

"So those schools and the kids in them are still at risk. It’s something we need a strong sense of urgency around, something that we need to get on with now."

To date, the provincial government has only worked on 12 or 14 of the 80 worst schools, he added.

"What it comes down to is that they have to put money into the equation," he said. "Hopefully the earthquake in China will redouble the effort to get something done because it is extremely important."

—With files from IANS