Police restricted the last couple kilometers (miles) of road into Beichuan to emergency vehicles, with military trucks and cranes still edging around huge boulders still blocking their path.
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Dozens of ordinary people were also trudging up the winding mountain road, carrying backpacks and bags of food and medical supplies, on a quest to find missing relatives.
Liu Jingyong, a 43-year-old migrant worker searching for his cousin, had traveled two days by bus and now foot just to get near his relative's home.
"I have not had any information from him," Liu said. "This is so hard on me."
The government said it had allocated 5.4 billion yuan (US$772 million, EUR 500 million) for earthquake relief, according to the central bank's Web site, up sharply from the figure of 1.11 billion yuan (US$159 million, EUR 103 million) two days ago.
Given the extend of destruction of roads, schools, homes, businesses and other infrastructure, AIR Worldwide, a catastrophe risk modeling firm, said it estimated that losses to both insured and uninsured property would likely exceed US$20 billion (EUR 13 billion).
The first international relief workers started working in the disaster zone, with a rescue crew from Japan arriving early Friday. China had initially been reluctant to accept foreign offers of help, but the Foreign Ministry said in a statement early Friday that specialist teams from Russia, South Korea, and Singapore were also welcome.
Singapore's Foreign Ministry said a 55-member team would arrive in Sichuan later Friday.
Experts said the time for rescues was growing short.
"Anyone buried in an earthquake can survive without water and food for three days," said Gu Linsheng, a researcher with Tsinghua University's Emergency Management Research Center. "After that, it's usually a miracle for anyone to survive."
Nearly 70,000 injured people were being treated at hospitals in Sichuan, Dr. Shen Ji, director general of the provincial health department, told reporters in Chengdu.
He said there had not been an outbreak of any earthquake-related epidemics.
The Health Ministry posted a notice on its Web site for disease prevention, saying that saving lives was the top priority for now and then "public sanitation and epidemic control and prevention should be thoroughly carried out." Bodies should be cleaned and buried as soon as possible, the ministry advised.
AP photo
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