Multiple earthquakes shook a remote province in western China on Wednesday morning, killing at least 589 people and injuring more than 10,000 others.

The rumblings started in Yushu, a rural county in the southern part of Qinghai province that is home to about 100,000 people, at about 7:49 a.m. local time. The U.S. Geological Survey said at least six tremors occurred in a three-hour period, all of which registered a magnitude of 5.0 or higher.

Karsum Nyima, the deputy head of news at the Yushu county TV station, said the largest quake -- which the USGS measured at a magnitude of 6.9 -- left residents running for their lives as their mud-and-wood homes collapsed.

"In a flash, the houses went down. It was a terrible earthquake," Nyima said in a telephone interview with China Central Television (CCTV). "In a small park, there is a Buddhist pagoda and the top of the pagoda fell off. … Everybody is out on the streets, standing in front of their houses, trying to find their family members."

In Jiegu, the main city in Yushu county, located about 30 kilometres from the epicenter of the Wednesday quakes, an estimated 85 per cent of the local houses had collapsed, local official Zhuohuaxia told the official Xinhua News Agency.

"The streets in Jiegu are thronged with panic and full of injured people, with many of them bleeding from their injuries," Zhouhuaxia was quoted as saying.

Several schools in the region collapsed, killing at least 56 students, according to Xinhua. The agency reported that the worst hit was the Yushu Vocational School, where 22 students died.

Footage broadcast on Qinghai Satellite TV showed bodies lying on the ground wrapped in blankets as rescuers pulled slabs of concrete from one of the damaged schools.

Many students were boarders at the schools and were preparing for class when the tremors began.

"Students just got up and were yet to go to class when the quake happened. I recovered several bodies from the debris and found they were fully dressed," said Zhu Liang, a government worker who joined the rescue effort.

The quake occurred along the Longmenshan fault, which runs underneath the mountains that divide the Tibetan plateau and the Sichuan plain.

Rescue challenges

Wu Yong, commander of the local army garrison, warned that the death toll "may rise further as lots of houses collapsed."

Wu said the rescue effort was being hampered by strong winds and frequent aftershocks, as well as downed phone lines. Other officials said a lack of excavators left paramilitary police shoveling away rubble by hand.

Additional challenges come with the mountainous terrain that is local to Yushu county, which ABC News correspondent Clarissa Ward said sits more than 3.6 kilometres above sea level.

"The roads are incredibly poor, many of those roads have been damaged by the quake and that's making it really tough for rescue workers to get in there and more importantly to get the equipment in there that they need to try to dig people out from under the rubble," Ward told CTV News Channel by telephone from Beijing.

By evening, rescue crews had set up emergency generators to restart operations at the Yushu airport, where six flights containing rescue crews and equipment managed to land.

But a landslide blocked the road into town and temperatures dipped below freezing as night fell.

Ren Yu, the general manager of the Yushu Hotel in Jiegu, said the sudden collapse of so many buildings put "so much dust in the air, we couldn't see anything."

"There was a lot of panic. People were crying on the streets. Some of our staff, who were reunited with their parents, were also in tears," he said during a telephone interview with The Associated Press.

The Yushu Hotel was relatively undamaged and more than 100 of its guests were relocated in the aftermath of the disaster. Ren said he and his staff then turned their attention to helping rescue people in other buildings where the damage had been much greater.

"We pulled out 70 people, but some of them died on the way to the hospital," he said.

Supplies needed

Qinghai's provincial government said it had distributed 5,000 tents and 100,000 coats and blankets to survivors who were left outdoors in harsh winds and single-digit temperatures in the aftermath of the quakes.

Francis Markus, a spokesperson for the International Federation of the Red Cross, said it is believed that the destruction from Wednesday's quakes will not be nearly as devastating as the disaster in neighbouring Sichuan province that killed tens of thousands of people nearly two years ago.

"We believe and we hope at this stage that we are not looking at a disaster of the proportions of the Sichuan earthquake which saw, obviously, more than 80,000 people dead," Markus told CTV's Canada AM during a telephone interview from Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, on Wednesday.

"We are basing the hope on the fact that this is a very remote area -- very rugged and sparsely populated, although there are some small towns and townships but a lot of it is populated by herders and farmers out in the countryside."

In the rural areas within Qinghai province, many houses are built out of simple materials, which has left them vulnerable, Markus said.

"Generally in the countryside, most of the housing is made of earth and timber, so in many cases, perhaps a large number of injuries, which we're seeing…are caused by the collapse of housing like that," he said.

With files from The Associated Press