The earthquake damaged schools, hospitals, roads, railway lines, factories, chemical plants, power lines and dams. Many survivors are sleeping outdoors for fear of aftershocks—a powerful one that measured 6.1 on the Richter scale ripped through the province on Tuesday.

Additional aftershocks have wreaked further havoc, including the collapse of a middle school in the Sichuan city of Dujiangyan that trapped 900 children. Just east of the epicenter, 1,000 students and teachers were reportedly killed or missing at a collapsed high school in Beichuan County. China's Premier Wen Jiabao flew to the province Monday to direct disaster relief efforts and troops were dispatched to the area to help.

This earthquake was the worst to hit China since 1976, when a magnitude 7.5 temblor struck the northern Chinese city of Tangshan, leaving 240,000 dead. Despite decades of effort since then, seismologists still have not settled on a reliable  early warning system for such deadly quakes, though systems are used in Japan and Europe. Nevertheless, Chinese media have included anecdotal reports of unusual swarms of toads in the region immediately prior to the devastating quake.

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