Twenty-one villagers are missing after a landslide flattened a village in southwest China's Sichuan Province Tuesday morning, the latest in a series of rain-triggered disasters across the country. About 100,000 cubic meters of rock and mud slid down Ermanshan Mountain near Shuanghe Village, Hanyuan County, Ya'an City, at around 5 a.m. Tuesday, smashing into three scores of brick houses at the foot of the mountain, Xinhua quoted local officials as saying. Armed police combing the rubble saved three survivors -- including a 80-year-old -- and helped thousands of villagers re-locate. Xinhua reporters saw the ruins of a row of three-story brick houses and part of a normally forest-covered slope of Ermanshan mountain covered by a layer of mud and rocks poised to slide further down.
