JUYUAN, China (AP) -- Juyuan Middle School students were settling in to afternoon arts and humanities classes when their four-story classroom building collapsed, setting off a wave of tragedy and disbelief that was only beginning to sink in 24 hours later.
The grief unleashed by Monday's magnitude-7.9 earthquake was etched across Juyuan, a farming and manufacturing town perched in the foothills of the Tibetan highlands. As rescue teams sifted through the wreckage for survivors, worried and sometimes wailing parents looked on in a cold, steady drizzle Tuesday.
"You tell us to wait. We can't wait anymore. We must have some information," a woman pleaded with soldiers at the edge of what was left of the school. Troops lined two deep kept the emotional family members away from the teams working with cranes and hand tools.
All but a handful of the more than 900 upper-class students were believed trapped under the slabs of cement, bricks, tile and twisted cables. Only one survivor has been found, a girl pulled free by a crack rescue team and whose name has not been released.
Orange-suited rescuers, medics and soldiers of the People's Liberation Army ferried out the young victims on doors salvaged from the ruins. Most were eighth- and ninth-graders bound for senior high school and a chance for upward mobility in the town an hour northwest of the provincial capital, Chengdu. Watch rescuers pull a child from the rubble »
The school's rapid collapse left them little chance. Engineers said walls and support columns gave way almost instantly, causing the slab on which each upper floor was build to smash flat onto the one below, an effect sometimes known as "pancaking."
"These buildings just weren't made for that powerful of a quake. Some don't even meet the basic specifications," said Dai Jun, a structural engineer and concrete specialist in Chengdu who was surveying damage in the area.
Authorities have not said whether they'll investigate the collapse. Neighboring and adjoining school buildings suffered relatively little damage.
Rescue crews arrived in hours. By 3 a.m. Tuesday, 60 bodies had been recovered, with several dozen more pulled out later in the day.
Taken to the edge of the school yard turned muddy by the rains, the earthquake victims were placed under a tarp canopy and wrapped in sheets and blankets, some splattered with blood.
Families staged impromptu religious rites. A few lit incense and candles while others set off fireworks to ward off evil spirits. Most, though, appeared numb with shock and sat quietly next to the bodies.
Among the victims was ninth-grader Li Yulu, whose family displayed a blown-up photograph of her smiling face among the laid-out dead. The picture contrasted with the mangled condition many of the corpses arrived in.
Because the quake struck shortly before 2:30 p.m. Monday, students seemed disproportionately among the victims in Juyuan and across the quake-devastated counties of Sichuan.
Just east of the epicenter, in Beichuan county, 1,000 students and teachers were killed or missing at a collapsed high school -- a more than six-story building reduced to a pile of rubble about 2 yards (meters) high, according to Xinhua. Another 200 people, mostly children, were buried at two schools in Hanwang township.
While boasting only basic facilities -- a concrete courtyard, netless basketball hoops and soccer net made of steel pipe -- Juyuan was a magnet school attracting the region's top students, many of them from isolated communities who boarded in an adjacent dormitory.
Unless more survivors are found, the quake will have wiped out the school's entire graduating class and about half its student population.
"They were all our friends, and we'll miss them a lot," said a Juyuan seventh-grader who gave her name as Xiao Mei and wore the school's red, white and blue track suit uniform. "I'm very sad."