BEIJING, China (CNN) -- Thousands of people have been killed by Monday's powerful earthquake in just one affected region of central China, its government said, with the toll expected to keep rising as bodies are retrieved from schools, homes and factories.
Rescuers try to help a child trapped in the rubble at Juyuan Middle School in Dujiangyan City.
State-run news agency Xinhua said the official toll had risen to 8,533 in Sichuan Province.
It reported that authorities were yet to reach Wenchuan County, which sits at the epicenter of the 7.8-magnitude earthquake with a population of about 112,000.
In Beichuan County, close to Wenchuan, the number of deaths was estimated at more than 3,000, with 80 percent of the buildings destroyed.
In addition, at least 48 people were killed in the northwest Gansu Province, Xinhua said.
Several hundred students were also feared to be buried in collapsed school buildings, the agency said.
China's Seismological Bureau said the earthquake had affected more than half the country's provinces and municipalities.
President George W. Bush released a statement saying the United States "stands ready to help in any way possible."
"I am particularly saddened by the number of students and children affected by this tragedy," Bush said.
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In Sichuan's Shifang city, the quake buried hundreds of people in two collapsed chemical plants, and more than 80 tons of ammonia leaked out, Xinhua said.
The local government evacuated 6,000 civilians from the area after homes and factories were also destroyed. 
The quake was "felt in most parts of China," Xinhua reported, with the confirmed casualties in the provinces and municipality of Sichuan, Gansu, Chongqing and Yunnan.
Xinhua said several schools collapsed, at least partially, in the quake.
At one, as many as 900 students were feared buried. At least 50 bodies have been pulled from the rubble at the high school in the Juyuan Township of Dujiangyan City in Wenchuan County.
"Some buried teenagers were struggling to break loose from underneath the ruins while others were crying out for help," Xinhua reported.
"Grieved parents watched as five cranes were excavating at the site and an ambulance was waiting.
"An unknown number of students were also reported buried after buildings collapsed at five other schools in the province's Deyang City."
One person was killed in Santai County, in the city of Mianyang, when a water tower fell, the news agency reported.
A provincial government spokesman said they feared more dead and injured in collapsed houses in Dujiangyan City, Xinhua reported.
The news agency also quoted a driver for the seismological bureau saying he saw "rows of houses collapsed" in Dujiangyan.
Chinese President Hu Jintao immediately ordered an all-out effort to help victims of the earthquakes, Xinhua reported. It said Premier Wen Jiabao would go there to direct the rescue work.
Bonnie Thie, the country director the Peace Corps, was on a university campus in Chengdu about 100 km from the epicenter, in the eastern part of China's Sichuan province, when the first quake hit.
"You could see the ground shaking," Thie told CNN.
The shaking "went on for what seemed like a very long time," she said.
"This is a very dangerous earthquake," said Bruce Presgrave, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey.
The quake had the potential to cause major damage because of its strength and proximity to major population centers, he said. 
In addition, the earthquake was relatively shallow, Presgrave said, and those kinds of quakes tend to do more damage near the epicenter than deeper ones.
An earthquake with 7.5 magnitude in the northern Chinese city of Tangshan killed 255,000 people in 1976 -- the greatest death toll from an earthquake in the last four centuries and the second greatest in recorded history, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
Tangshan is roughly 1,600 km from Chengdu, the nearest major city to the epicenter of Monday's quake.
After the first quake struck Monday, the ground shook as far away as Beijing, which is 1,500 km from the epicenter.
They felt "a very quiet rolling sensation" that lasted for about a minute, according to CNN correspondent John Vause.
"Our building began to sway," he said.
Thousands of people were evacuated from Beijing high-rises immediately after the earthquake.
At least six more earthquakes -- measuring between 4.0 and 6.0 magnitudes -- happened nearby over the three hours after the initial quake at at 2:28 p.m. local time (0728 GMT), the USGS reported.
A spokesman for the Beijing Olympic Committee said no Olympic venues were affected by the earthquake. The massive Three Gorges Dam -- roughly 600 km east of the epicenter -- was not damaged, a spokesman said.
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