CNN's Ben Wedeman said drivers had to dodge piles of rubble in the streets.
Television footage of Beichuan showed few buildings standing amid piles of rubble in a narrow valley.
Many asteroids are weakly bound piles of rubble, held together by their own minute gravitational attraction.
ECONOMIST: The American Association for the Advancement of Science
The sheer number of families like who have seen their homes turned into nothing more than piles of rubble is staggering.
Bath is a glorious town: lovely crescents of white, upstanding houses instead of London's black, gloomy buildings or worse still piles of rubble that were once buildings.
Piles of rubble and burnt out vehicles form makeshift fighting positions.
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Not much damage at the place, but further down the road you could see what would be the pervasive image in New Orleans: damaged homes, giant piles of rubble and trash, and discarded refrigerators.
Scores of homes that were destroyed in nearby Mantoloking still look as they did the day after the storm piles of rubble and kindling, with the occasional bathroom fixture or personal possession visible among the detritus.
Piles of burnt rubble and scorched earth were clearly visible.
After seeing last month's tornado also turn homes into piles of splintered rubble, Black said she decided to try and outrun the tornado when she learned her southwest Oklahoma City home was in harm's way.
Tourists, who come searching for brightly coloured reefs, turn away in dismay from piles of unsightly grey rubble.
It's able to navigate through 18 inches of water, crawl over boulders and rubble piles, and move in ahead of rescuers to evaluate precarious environments and help plan operations.
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Before the probe was launched, astronomers did not know whether asteroids were solid objects or collections of smaller pieces of rock, referred to in the trade as rubble piles.
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