An earthquake measuring 5.6 on the Richter scale early today damaged thousands of houses in Sichuan province, where an 8.0 magnitude quake last May left nearly 90,000 people dead or missing and 5 million homeless.

The quake, which experts say is an aftershock of last year’s catastrophe, occurred at 2:03 am in Mianzhu city and destroyed 8,600 rural houses, 60 small bridges and about 30 km of fiber-optic cables, according to the Xinhua News Agency.

Another aftershock, measuring at around 5.0 m, happened at 3:24 pm, the provincial earthquake administration reported.

“It was a strong tremor. I could hear sounds like trains running beneath my feet. I ran downstairs with some other locals; the rest slept on because it was in the early morning and they probably got used to it,” Wei Xiao, a 22-year-old college graduate in Mianzhu, told China Daily.

Rendong, a Mianzhu blogger based at Sina.com, a popular portal, said in a blog entry published at 2:22 am yesterday that the earthquake “went on for about ten seconds and felt like at least a 6.0-m aftershock”.

“It’s so frightening that such a strong aftershock would occur more than a year after May 12 (of 2008)! It’d be certainly hard to sleep tonight… I hope no one was injured,” he said.

A total of eight quake-related injuries were officially announced, while an anonymous social worker in Mianzhu told China Daily the local civil affairs bureau “confirmed three deaths”.

Li Juan, a staff with the Deyang foreign affairs office, refuted the claim, saying that she only heard of “some tiles falling off from obsolete rural houses”.

Units of the provincial emergency response office were sent to Mianzhu directly after the quakes were cited as saying few visible damages were found throughout its townships.

A petition letter signed by 118 parents whose babies suffered from melamine urging collective litigation was submitted by four representatives to the supreme court yesterday in the northern Hebei province.

The parents’ group, headed by Beijing resident Zhao Lianhai, whose own son was sickened by the industrial chemical, told China Daily their letter was also submitted to the provincial intermediate court and the Xinhua district court.

“Our primary demands are to raise a collective litigation, waive all litigation fees and have a negotiation with the government and dairy producers before trial opens,” said Zhao, a former employee of China’s food safety watchdog.

The 37-year-old said he is “pleased with the intermediate court”, which sent two senior officials to talk with them for hours and promised to forward their requests to higher-level authorities.

“They appeared to be quite understanding. I hope they can fulfill their commitment,” Zhao said, adding that their petition campaign would continue every Wednesday from now to relevant courts in Beijing until their claims are “truly dealt with”.

The Xinhua District Court in Shijiazhuang, Hebei’s capital city where the now-defunct Sanlu Group was based, remains the only court that has accepted compensation lawsuits since the tainted milk scandal sickened nearly 300,000 children across China last fall.

The Supreme Court earlier said courts around the country should accept lawsuits filed by melamine victims against Sanlu and other dairy producers if they refuse to accept the current compensation scheme, which offers 200,000 yuan ($ 29,262) in death cases, 30,000 yuan ($ 4,389) for infants severely sickened and 2,000 yuan ($ 293) for other victims.

But the petition letter said with the exception of the Xinhua court, which accepted one relevant lawsuit in March and another in April, all other litigation attempts against the producers have failed.

“The compensation we could get is obviously unfair, and individual litigation has made many families like ours suffer even more,” said Li Xiaohong, whose son was sickened by melamine. “The justice system is our last resort and the final frontier for impartiality.”

The two cases, according to the parents, are still “not even close” to coming before the court.

Peng Jian, lawyer of the first compensation suit against Sanlu, told China Daily that the presiding judge had approached his client, a girl surnamed Li from Beijing’s Chaoyang district, in private.

“Now that’s something very rare, if not unreasonable,” Peng said.

He added that with all the possible difficulties in mind, the parents’ group should be seeking the lowest amount of compensation when they file the suit.

Zhao had earlier collected signatures from more than 550 parents nationwide on a similar petition letter that demanded changes to the compensation scheme. The letter worked to no avail.

At least six children died from kidney and urinary problems after they drank milk tainted with melamine, a chemical typically used to make plastic, since last September.

Melamine was added to watered-down milk to make it appear higher in protein. Ingestion in large amounts can cause kidney stones and kidney failure.