updated 10:33 p.m. ET May 13, 2008

MIANYANG, China - Soldiers hiking over landslide-blocked roads reached the epicenter of China's devastating earthquake Tuesday, pulling bodies and a few survivors from collapsed buildings. The death toll of more than 12,000 is certain to rise as the buried are found.

Crews worked through a steady rain as they searched wrecked towns across hilly stretches of Sichuan province that were stricken by Monday's magnitude-7.9 quake, China's deadliest in three decades. Tens of thousands of homeless spent a second night outdoors, some sleeping under plastic sheeting, others bused to a stadium in the city of Mianyang, on the edge of the disaster area.

Street lamps were switched on in Mianyang on Tuesday night, but all the buildings were dark and deserted after the government ordered people out of them for fear of aftershocks. Security guards were posted at apartment blocks to keep people out.

The industrial city of 700,000 people — home to the headquarters of China's nuclear weapons industry — was turned into a thronging refugee camp, with residents sleeping outdoors.

"I'm cold. I don't dare to sleep, and I'm worried a building is going to fall down on me," said Tang Ling, a 20-year-old waitress wrapped in a borrowed pink down jacket and camped outside the Juyuan restaurant with three co-workers. "What's happened is so cruel. In one minute to have so many people die is too tragic."

First wave of troops
As night fell, 200 troops entered the town of Wenchuan, near the epicenter, trudging across ruptured roads and mudslides, state television said. Initial reports from soldiers said one nearby town could account for only 2,300 survivors out of 9,000 people, China Central Television said.

At least 12,012 deaths occurred in Sichuan alone while another 323 died in five other provinces and the metropolis of Chongqing, state media reported. That toll seemed likely to jump sharply as rescue teams reached hard-hit towns.

The devastation and ramped-up rescue across large, heavily populated region of farms and factory towns strained local governments. Food dwindled on the shelves of the few stores that remained open. Gasoline was scarce, with long lines outside some stations and pumps marked "empty."

Buses carried survivors away from Beichuan, which was flattened — a few buildings standing amid piles of rubble in a narrow valley, according to CCTV video.

More than 10,000 people from there and surrounding areas packed Mianyang's Jiuzhou Gymnasium, with empty water bottles, boxes of instant noodles and cigarette cartons littering the ground.

"I saw rocks and earth rolling down the hill, and they destroyed whatever they hit below," said a farmer who only gave his surname, Chen, from the village of Leigu near Beichuan. "There's nothing I can do about this. It's all in the hands of the government."

In the provincial capital of Chengdu, FM-91.4 all-traffic radio station operated around the clock, reading text messages sent by survivors of stricken areas to let relatives know they are alive.

'We will save the people'
The government's high-gear response aimed to reassure Chinese while showing the world it was capable of handling the disaster and was ready for the Aug. 8-24 Olympics in Beijing. Although the government said it welcomed outside aid, officials said that the assistance would be confined to money and supplies, not to foreign personnel.

As Prime Minister Wen Jiabao crisscrossed the disaster area to oversee relief efforts, the official Xinhua news agency cited the Defense Ministry as saying that some 20,000 soldiers and police arrived in the disaster area, with 30,000 more on the way by plane, train, truck and on foot.

"We will save the people," Wen said through a bullhorn to survivors in Shifang, where two chemical plants collapsed and buried more than 600 people, according to CCTV. "As long as the people are there, factories can be built into even better ones, and so can the towns and counties."

The Finance Ministry said it had allocated $123 million in quake aid.

At the world famous Wolong National Nature Reserve, all 86 pandas were reported safe late Tuesday in the first word since communications with the preserve were cut off. A group of 31 British tourists panda-watching in the preserve also returned safely to Chengdu, the Foreign Ministry said, although there was no word on 12 missing Americans on a World Wildlife Fund tour.

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