County struggles to recover

Rescuers injured

An excavator toppled over the edge of a 300-meter cliff as it approached Baoxing on Sunday morning. Firefighters from a station in nearby Aba Tibetan autonomous prefecture rushed to the spot to help, according to the Ministry of Public Security. The driver of the excavator and his passengers are likely to be have been badly injured, but no details were available at press time.

Earthquake Strikes Ya'an, Sichuan

Chengdu Military Area Command dispatched about 20 helicopters on Sunday morning to transport emergency supplies and medical staff to Baoxing, Longmen county and Taiping town.

Yang Liu, a 40-year-old volunteer rescue worker from the Bluesky rescue team, a branch of the Beijing Red Cross, said he had lost contact with his 10 fellow volunteers who arrived in the county on Sunday. The fallen rocks that blocked the roads forced him to abandon his attempts to hike into Baoxing on Saturday night.

Normality is returning slowly: The first outbound phone call from Baoxing was made at 11:06 am on Sunday. Communications, including landline phones and the Internet, were restored at Baoxing county center before noon, following 27 hours of repair work by China Telecom, according to Xinhua.　

That at least provided some cause for optimism for Zhou Xiaofeng, a Baoxing county official. He was in Ya'an when the earthquake struck. He was planning to walk home on Sunday morning, or, if possible, grab a ride on any available vehicle. He said more than 6,200 people, including members of his own family, live in his hometown, but he has not heard from them. "I called and called throughout the day, but no one answered the phone," he said.

Wu Wencong and Jiang Xueqing contributed to this story.