After initially declining to accept experts from abroad, China has welcomed them. Several teams from Russia, Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore are expected in the next few days, the Foreign Ministry said, and a team of about 60 Japanese rescue workers arrived in Sichuan early Friday.
At China's request, the U.N. World Food Program said, it was sending enough ready-to-eat meals for nearly 120,000 people.
A stream of army trucks, heavy equipment and private aid headed out of Chengdu on Friday for badly hit Beichuan County, about 80 miles north. "Rice dishes from the National Tax Bureau," read the handwritten sign on one white truck.
Moving back to Chengdu as night fell were convoys of ambulances, their blue lights flashing in concert, ferrying the injured to bigger hospitals in the provincial capital.
Among the items in demand, according to local media, were first-aid kits, ready-to-eat meals, tarpaulins, blankets, clothing, flashlights and emergency lanterns.
Aid started to trickle in Friday to the epicenter of the huge quake after the opening of a few roads the day before allowed military trucks to haul in food and rescue equipment.
Housing Minister Jiang Weixin said the water supply situation was "extremely serious" in Sichuan, with 20 cities and counties not receiving water at all.
AIR Worldwide Corp., a catastrophe risk modeling firm, said losses to insured and uninsured property would probably exceed $20 billion.
Also Friday, a rescue team found a survivor and $140,000 in cash in the debris of a collapsed Bank of China branch office in Mianzhu, according to the New China Agency.
And in a harrowing story from Beichuan reported in the state media, Gong Tianxiu was discovered alive Thursday in the rubble of another bank after being buried 73 hours with her right leg under a boulder.
With no large equipment available, rescue workers, to save her life, passed the 40-year-old Gong a saw, which she used to cut off her leg, allowing her to be rushed by ambulance to a hospital, according to the People's Daily website.
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mark.magnier@latimes.com
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Gao Wenhuan of The Times' Beijing Bureau contributed to this report.
