A week after a devastating landslide struck Pengshui County in southwest China’s Chongqing Municipality, rescue teams have recovered three more bodies from the mountain of debris, pushing the confirmed death toll to 11 while 50 people remain unaccounted for, local Chinese authorities announced Thursday.
The massive slope collapse, which occurred last Friday, buried over 10 residential buildings in the mountainous county, leaving 10 people injured in its immediate aftermath. Eight fatalities were pulled from the rubble in the first 48 hours after the disaster, and the latest recovery operations have added three more names to the list of the dead.
Despite ongoing search operations, local government officials confirmed in an official statement that no signs of life have been detected in recent days, after repeated attempts to locate trapped survivors across the disaster site.
Pengshui County, located in southeastern Chongqing along the city’s borders with Hubei and Guizhou provinces, has posed extraordinary hurdles for first responders. The landslide deposited an enormous volume of rocky debris, including dozens of massive boulders that have blocked access to large sections of the impact zone.
To overcome these obstacles, search teams have deployed heavy construction equipment and aerial drone technology to map the area and clear rubble. Crews have also carried out controlled blasts to break down oversized boulders into manageable fragments, a necessary step to continue the painstaking search for missing residents. Rescue leaders have emphasized that the scale and composition of the collapsed material make the entire operation exceptionally challenging, with teams working around the clock to advance through the debris field.