China earthquake: Struggle to cope with 'Biblical' devastation
Pastor Dale Morgan
China earthquake: Struggle to cope with 'Biblical' devastation*
By David Eimer
Last updated: 1:55 AM BST 18/05/2008
In what used to be the village of Yong Anzhen on the road to Beichuan,
Yang Jing Xun and his wife were sitting on a pile of twisted wood and
crumpled bricks. "This is my house," said Mr Yang.
Every one of the basic homes in this tiny farming village in the
mountains of western China’s Sichuan Province has been destroyed or left
uninhabitable. "Be careful," Mr Yang warned, as part of the wall of one
dwelling broke off and landed nearby. "The houses are still collapsing."
Mr Yang’s neighbours were sitting under flimsy shelters made out of
plastic covering and were boiling rice on an open fire. Their homes are
just some of more than three million in Sichuan destroyed by the
earthquake that devastated China’s second-most populous province and
left 28,881 people confirmed dead, with tens of thousands still buried
in the rubble.
The Chinese authorities have responded with an unprecedented effort to
rescue those who are trapped and to bring relief to those who have
survived, especially in the most devastated cities.
But, like most of the people living in the smaller villages and towns
that lie on the road through remote Beichuan County, the residents of
Yong Anzhen have been left to fend for themselves since the first
tremors on Monday.
"We've had no help from the government," said Mr Yang. Nor are they
expecting any to materialise. "We're waiting for our relatives who are
migrant workers to come back and help us."
Instead, they have been relying on donations of water, rice and instant
noodles from the small army of volunteers who drive this road every day
doling out supplies — on their own initiative, and at their own expense.
When the Telegraph's car stopped by the side of the road, desperate
survivors raced out and surrounded it, appealing for food and water.
The original quake, which has been followed by a series of unnerving
aftershocks, measured 7.9 on the Richter Scale. As well as the dead — a
number steadily rising, and widely expected to reach more than 50,000 —
it has left an estimated 200,000 injured and almost five million homeless.
It was the deadliest to strike China since 240,000 people died in the
1976 Tangshan earthquake.
The dams and retaining walls of 17 reservoirs have also been damaged.
Rescue officials said they were concerned not only by the possibility
that damaged dams might inundate the area with floodwater but also that
water from a river near Beichuan, choked by fallen debris, would burst
its banks.
More than 2,000 people were being evacuated from Qingchuan town, further
north, where blocked portions of Qingzhu river had created widespread
flooding.
The region is also home to China's biggest nuclear weapons facility in
Mianyang, as well as other top-secret nuclear sites, raising fears that
earthquake damage may lead to radiation leaks.
More than 130,000 soldiers have been mobilised by the government, while
rescue workers from all over China and Japan, South Korea, Taiwan,
Singapore and Russia have arrived in the area. The equivalent of
£249 million has been allocated in relief funds.
But it is still not enough. The aid effort has passed so many people by
that some stand by the roadside holding up signs written on cardboard
appealing for help. "The government hasn't come," one woman told the
Telegraph. "They just drive past."
If she could see Beichuan, then she would know why they are not stopping
to help. The capital of Beichuan County lies in a mountain valley just
60 miles from the epicentre of the earthquake and was home to 160,000
people, until Monday. Along with Wenchuan County, it is the hardest-hit
area and has been the focus of the rescue efforts.
Reaching Beichuan is not easy. The one road that winds up through the
mountains is clogged with army vehicles, heavy-lifting equipment and
hundreds of cars driven by volunteers desperate to help.
Private cars are stopped about 12 miles away by police roadblocks, where
some foreign journalists have been turned back. The Telegraph and our
photographer travelled onwards, first on the back of a tractor and then
on a motorbike.
Finally, we walked past lines of weary soldiers and rescue workers who
were being replaced by rested colleagues to discover that Beichuan
exists now only as a name on a map and not as a city.
When the earthquake hit, the ground shook here for almost 10 terrifying
minutes, unleashing forces of a Biblical fury that sent buildings
crashing down in moments and sparked enormous landslides in the
surrounding mountains.
Now, Beichuan is one giant, seemingly endless heap of concrete, masonry
and metal. Those buildings still somehow standing lean at crazy,
cartoon-like angles and look as if a gust of wind would bring them down.
As we walked through the streets, rescue workers urged us to move
quickly. "Hurry up, it's dangerous here. The rocks are still falling,"
they told us.
"Rocks" hardly does justice to the boulders the size of small houses
that came down from the mountains, punching enormous holes through
buildings, crushing cars flat and leaving the hillsides looking as if
they have been gouged out by an enormous knife. Those not killed when
their homes and workplaces collapsed, died in landslides.
The dead are the main presence in Beichuan. Some lie in the streets,
with blackened faces and stomachs swelling in the heat and covered in
the grey dust that hangs over the city like a haze.
But most — no one knows how many — are buried underneath the rubble. The
sickly-sweet smell of death is so pervasive it has desensitised the
sniffer dogs working with the rescue teams, rendering them useless.
In this apocalyptic place, people risk their lives by clambering on the
rubble of their missing relatives' and friends' homes, calling out the
names of their loved ones. Other survivors return briefly to salvage
whatever possessions they can carry on their backs.
The Telegraph saw one man being led away by police, not in handcuffs but
with a rope around his neck and hands after being found looting.
Zhao Yang was one Beichuan resident who had returned. A slight,
23-year-old woman, she looked far older than her years as she leant
heavily on a stick staring in stunned disbelief at her destroyed hometown.
"I wasn't here for the earthquake. I've come back today for the first
time. My mother and daughter are dead. My husband is in the hospital,"
she said. Understandably, Mrs Zhao seemed unable to fully comprehend
what had happened. "My heart is sore. It hurts me to see Beichuan now,"
she said finally.
Much of the rescue effort is concentrated on Beichuan Middle School.
Like so many other schools in the areas hit by the earthquake, the
four-storey building collapsed far too easily. All that is left of it is
a mass of twisted metal and concrete.
Textbooks and crushed desks lay amongst the ruins, where an estimated
300 pupils and teachers are buried. As four cranes lifted slabs of
concrete and hundreds of soldiers and rescue workers clad in face masks
worked to clear the rubble, some of the missing began to emerge.
At first, it was just individual body parts that were visible. A foot
clad in a dirty white sock. An arm poking out, the watch on its wrist
stopped at 2:28pm, the time the earthquake struck. Then the bodies began
to be lifted out. They were laid on stretchers and covered in green
plastic sheets before being taken away. "I think this must have been the
stairs," said one watching army medic. "That's why there are so many
bodies here. They were coming down the stairs when the building collapsed."
He had nothing to do except watch, because five days after the
earthquake struck there is dwindling hope of people being found alive. A
survivor was pulled from the wreckage of the school on Friday, while a
German tourist was rescued in Wenchuan County on Saturday after being
buried, but almost all of the missing will not be found alive.
Despite that, the rescue operation goes on 24 hours a day. The only halt
came when China's President Hu Jintao arrived for a tour of Beichuan on
Friday. Always low-key in public, there was nothing Churchillian about
his brief speech to the rescue workers at the school.
They cheered anyway, and rushed to take pictures with their mobile
phones, as Mr Hu told them to "be unafraid of fatigue and work around
the clock, making great efforts to keep losses to a minimum".
Overhead, two parachutes loaded with supplies floated down and landed on
a neighbouring hill. But there were few helicopters visible, even though
the military has deployed 110 to Sichuan. Most are flying in Wenchuan
County, where collapsed bridges and roads blocked by landslides mean the
earthquake zone can only be reached by air or by boats up the Wen River.
While people living outside the worst-affected areas are camped out in
home-made tents, survivors from Beichuan and Wenchuan are being given
temporary shelter in those schools still standing or in sports stadiums
like the Jiuzhou Gymnasium in Mianyang, where at least 20,000 are staying.
There are many cases of children who have either lost, or been separated
from their parents, including around 70 from mountain villages near
Beichuan who were staying in tents in the grounds of Pinganzhen Middle
School, 20 miles from Beichuan.
They had walked for seven hours to reach Pinganzhen on Thursday. "We
think 12 of them are now orphans," said Kang Jia Jun, a music teacher at
the school who was looking after them. "But this is a very poor area and
many of their parents are migrant workers in the cities, so they live
with other family members who may now be dead."
Yang Ping, 14, was one of them. "I live with my grandfather, but I don't
know where he is now," he said. "My parents don't know where I am and I
don't have a contact number for them."
Little help was forthcoming from the authorities. "We've had nothing
from the central government," said Ms Kang. Like so many other
survivors, the children are dependant on the charity of strangers. "I'm
from Sichuan, but I live in Beijing," said the driver of one car with
licence plates from the Chinese capital, 1,500 miles away, that was
pulling into the school loaded with water. "I'm here to help."