HANWANG, China — Military helicopters dropped food and medicine to Chinese earthquake survivors who remained cut off today in remote mountain villages behind roads clogged by landslides. The official death toll rose to nearly 15,000, and state media said tens of thousands more were buried or missing.

As help began to arrive in some of the hardest-to-reach areas, some victims trapped for more than two days under collapsed buildings were still being pulled out alive. But the enormous scale of the devastation meant that resources were stretched thin, and makeshift aid stations and refugee centers were springing up over the disaster area the size of Maryland.

The official Xinhua News Agency quoted government officials as saying rescuers who hiked today into the city of Yingxiu in Wenchuan county — the epicenter of Monday's magnitude 7.9 quake — found it "much worse than expected."

The official death toll rose today to 14,866, Xinhua said, but it was not immediately clear if that number included the 7,700 reported dead in Yingxiu. In Sichuan province alone, another 25,788 people were buried and 14,051 missing, provincial vice governor Li Chengyun said, according to Xinhua.

Unlike previous natural disasters in China, state media has reported prominently on the quake. State television has canceled regular programming to run 24-hour coverage.

Scenes of destruction and death have been shown, along with prominent focus on Premier Wen Jiabao, who rushed Monday to Sichuan to oversee the rescue work. He has been shown crawling into collapsed buildings to urge survivors to hang on, and seen reassuring children who had just lost their parents.

The toll was expected to rise further once rescuers reach other towns in Wenchuan that remain cut off from the Sichuan provincial capital of Chengdu more than two days after the quake. Roads leading to Wenchuan from all directions were still being cleared of debris, Feng Zhenglin, deputy minister of railway and transportation, said in Beijing.

The death toll for Mianyang city was also confirmed at 5,430, up from 3,629, on today, Xinhua said, with more than 18,000 people there still thought to be buried under crushed buildings.

At a middle school Sichuan province's Qingchuan county where students were taking a noon nap when the quake demolished a three-story building, 178 children were confirmed dead in the rubble and another 23 remained missing, Xinhua said.

Storms that had prevented flights to some of the worst-hit areas finally cleared today. Military helicopters were seen flying north over Dujiangyan, and Xinhua said two of them airdropped food, drinking water and medicine to Yingxiu.

Trains were on their way to Sichuan carrying quilts, drinking water, tents and military personnel, Ministry of Railways spokesman Wong Yongping said. All railways in the province were working except for a line where a 40-car freight train was trapped by a landslide in a tunnel and burned, he said.

Rescuers raced to save people trapped under flattened buildings.

A 34-year-old woman who was eight months pregnant was rescued after spending 50 hours under debris in Dujiangyan.

In the Beichuan region, a 3-year-old girl who was trapped for more than 40 hours under the bodies of her parents was pulled to safety, Xinhua said.

Rescuers found Song Xinyi on Tuesday morning, but were unable to pull her out right away due to fears the debris above her would collapse. She was fed and shielded from the rain until rescuers extricated her from the rubble.

Wen looked over her wounds, part of his highly publicized tour of the disaster area aimed at reassuring the public about the government's response and to show the world that the country is ready to host the Beijing Olympics in August. Today's leg of the Olympic torch relay in the southeastern city of Ruijin began with a minute of silence.

Wen said some 100,000 troops and police had been dispatched to the disaster zone.