Rescue teams now in race against time

Time is of the essence if people's lives are to be saved in Sichuan, survivors of the Tangshan earthquake that killed 240,000 people on July 28, 1976, said yesterday.

At 7.8 on the Richter scale, the earthquake that hit Sichuan province yesterday was exactly the same size as the one that devastated Tangshan, Hebei province more than three decades ago.

A survivor of that disaster was Jin Bosheng, who lost his wife and two of his daughters to the quake. His third daughter survived but lost a leg.