The hope for surviving is dimming and some officials said they expect the death toll to climb to 20,000.

    Mianzhu, China - As rescue workers plowed deeper into the wreckage left from Monday's earthquake, uncovering more victims trapped in the most remote mountain villages near the epicenter in Sichuan Province, the death toll soared to nearly 15,000.

    The new figure was announced by Chinese state news services as night fell Wednesday in China. Now more than 48 hours after the quake, the hope for surviving is dimming and some officials said they expect the death toll to climb to 20,000.

    "Some towns basically have no houses left. They have all been razed to the ground,'' Wang Yi, an official of the paramilitary police was quoted as telling Sichuan Online, a news service.

    In Mianzhu, outside the Zhu Renmin Hospital, where thousands of dead and severely injured people were gathered in a parking lot, police and government workers arrived to help move patients to the provincial capital, Chengdu, and other area hospitals.

    Doctors raced to move hospital beds into tents to care for patients huddled in the cold. Surgical gloves, used needles and bed pans littered the grounds along with blood-stained mattresses and adult diapers.

    "I've never seen so many people dead or injured," said Luo Ping, a pediatric nurse.

    Rescuers on Tuesday reached hard hit Beichuan. TV footage showed soldiers in green camouflage lifting large chunks of concrete and talking to students who remained under the rubble.

    "How many of you are there?" a rescuer asked.

    "About 30," a chorus of young voices answered back.

    Aftershocks and government warnings about safety helped keep nervous survivors outside of buildings. The official Xinhua News Agency said 80 percent of the buildings had collapsed in Beichuan.

    The quake struck Monday afternoon and was felt across much of China. It was the worst quake in the country since 1976, when tens of thousands perished.

    Rescue workers, including thousands of Chinese troops, made their way through mud and landslides to reach the remote epicenter in mountainous Sichuan Province.

    Officials expressed gratitude for offers of relief supplies from around the world, but said they would not admit foreign aid workers immediately because they could not accommodate outside personnel.

    Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao traveled to Dujiangyan, where a middle school collapsed and trapped hundreds of students. He also visited other other locations.

    Part of the main highway up to Beichuan, a hard-hit area north of Chengdu near the epicenter, was closed much of Tuesday compounding the job of getting aid to the tens of thousands of people left injured or homeless by the quake.

    The alternate road was rutted and mud lined in places with scores of tractors, farm thrashers and bulldozers making their way slowly to assist in the rescue or for use in the imminent wheat harvest. Trucks ambled along bearing road-making equipment on their flatbeds, an apparent response to the premier's call to open the roads into the battered area by midnight Tuesday.

    "Wen visited here this morning," said a man surnamed Zhang in neighboring Shifang, who declined to give his first name given the sensitivity of speaking to foreigners. "The mayor met him, we didn't, but we were very touched he took the time."

    Zhang was sitting with five family members huddled in a tent made of two oversized umbrellas and a tarp beside their collapsed house. "I don't know how we're ever going to pay to rebuild."

    The city is filled with patrolling police, some saying, "Stay Calm. Don't Panic" over scratchy microphones.

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