At least 20 people were killed after residential buildings collapsed in the eastern Chinese coastal city of Wenzhou yesterday and rescuers were looking for survivors, state news agency Xinhua said.
As of 7pm or 1100 GMT, only six survivors had been pulled from the debris, Xinhua quoted the district government as saying.
It was unknown how many people were in the buildings when the accident happened.
Xinhua did not give a cause for the pre-dawn collapse in Wenzhou’s Lucheng industrial district in Zhejiang province and said that investigations were still going on.
The collapsed buildings were built by villagers and five adjacent houses built in the 1970s remain standing, though rescuers are demolishing them to avoid secondary disasters, Xinhua said.
Pictures from the scene showed workers in orange suits sifting through a mountain of rubble.
Xinhua said rescuers were still verifying the number of people trapped under the debris.
But it cited survivor Yan Yongfa, a 57-year-old migrant worker, as saying that each room housed at least two to three people – many of them migrants like himself.
Yan lived with four other workers in a room rented for them by their boss.
Hundreds of millions of people have moved from China’s countryside to its towns and cities in recent decades, their labour fuelling its economic boom.
But many remain poorly paid and face restrictions on buying homes in the areas where they work.
The cause of the collapse was still under investigation.
“To protect those who are trapped, we are mainly digging with our bare hands so that work is going slowly,” fire department officer Sun Jing told Xinhua, adding that the debris was piled three storeys high.
Neighbouring buildings constructed in the 1970s were being demolished to prevent further collapses, the agency added.
China has seen several building collapses in recent years, with some blamed on low-quality construction.
In May 16 people were reported dead after a residential building in Guizhou province in the southwest collapsed due to landslides.
Two people were killed and 24 injured in April when a storm brought down a wholesale market building in Foshan city in the southern province of Guangdong.