At least five elementary school students are confirmed dead in a landslide that buried as many as 18 children in a Chinese village in Yunnan province, the Xinhua News agency says.
A resident in a nearby farmhouse was also buried by the landslide that struck around 8.a.m. local time.
The mud and rocks slid down a steep hillside after several days of rain, the state broadcaster CCTV reports, according to CNN.
“When we arrived, we saw one side of the mountain had collapsed and covered the primary school,” Yang Jianping, squadron leader of Yiliang County Armed Police, tells CCTV. “We can’t recognize the school at all.”
The students at the Tiantou Primary School in the village of Zhenhe would normally have been off Thursday for a national holiday, but were instead making up for classes they missed because of an earthquake last month that killed at least 81 people, reports say.
Rescue teams pulled the bodies of five students from the rubble, but the fate of the remaining 13 students was not immediately clear.
The students were buried by an estimated 160,000 cubic meters of earth that also plugged a nearby river, forming a lake that is 45 wide and 21 feet deep.
Xinhua says the government moved 800 residents downstream while nearly 2,000 people were mobilized to reopen the river.