Chinese rescuers blast boulders to reach landslide victims

Rescuers in Pengshui Miao and Tujia Autonomous County, Chongqing, blasted boulders to open a route to people trapped by a landslide that killed at least eight people and left 34 missing. The operation unfolded in steep country along the Wujiang River, where heavy rock and mud had pinned homes, cut off access and forced crews to choose between speed and the danger of shaking the slope loose again.

Excavators were sent in first to comb through the rubble, but the size of the rocks made machine removal too slow and too risky. After three days of torrential rain, the blockage was severe enough that controlled blasting became one of the few ways to clear a path for search teams, ambulances and recovery crews. In a disaster where every hour mattered for anyone still alive beneath the debris, the choice reflected a hard operational tradeoff: explosives could restore access faster than hauling boulders by machine, yet any blast also carried the chance of triggering more collapse.

The landslide buried homes and pushed more than 1,100 people from their neighborhoods, turning the rescue into a mass displacement problem as well as a search for the missing. In mountainous parts of southwestern China, landslides can isolate entire communities in minutes, blocking roads, delaying medical care and disrupting communications just when emergency workers need the fastest possible access.

A separate landslide analysis of the Hanjia slope in Chongqing pointed to a cut at the foot of the hillside as a possible factor in the failure, a reminder that road work and hillside development can intensify instability when rain saturates the ground. In Pengshui, the immediate task remained brutally physical: break through the boulders, reach the missing and keep the rescue route from collapsing again.