Chinese firefighters worked in treacherous terrain on Tuesday to help evacuate more than 11,000 people after a magnitude-6.8 quake struck China’s mountainous southwestern province of Sichuan a day earlier, killing at least 66 people. State media footage, taken at the epicentre in Luding county, showed firefighters stretchering an injured person across a makeshift bridge built with tree trunks as muddy torrents raged below them. 

Evacuees who could walk followed a trail of scree alongside the river abutting slopes stripped of soil cover by Monday’s quake. Some of them were clutching onto their belongings while others carried injured people on their backs, a video from local media showed. In another video, firefighters were seen carrying a woman on a stretcher, out from a dangerously teetering four-storey wooden building.