As Time Runs Out, Rescuers Still Find Quake Survivors
By ANDREW JACOBS
Published: May 17, 2008
YINHUA, China — Four days after a powerful earthquake turned this picturesque mountain town into a jumble of beams and brick and gray roof tiles, villagers stood on a knoll to watch rescue workers pick through the remains of a six-story apartment block. At one point came a hush, and then a burst of applause, as a man emerged from a slit in the rubble, his body draped in a floral blanket.
All across devastated Sichuan Province, similar moments of hope and survival played out on Friday as soldiers and rescue workers in orange jumpsuits combed through toppled down homes and schools.
At least 10 people were pulled out alive, including a nurse extracted from the ruins of clinic in Beichuan, a man discovered in a collapsed fertilizer plant in Shifang and a man who could be freed only by amputating his arm and leg.
But for every survivor, it seemed, there were hundreds died in the ruins of the country’s worst natural disaster in 30 years. The toll passed 22,000 on Friday afternoon, and could climb as high as 50,000, the government said.
A large aftershock in Li County, west of the epicenter, created additional landslides, burying cars, disrupting communication and making even more areas difficult for rescuers to reach, the government said.
On Friday morning, President Hu Jintao arrived in Sichuan to assess the damage, reaching the city of Mianyang, one of the worst hit areas. “Quake relief work has entered the most crucial phase,” he said, according to the state-run news media. “We must make every effort, race against time and overcome all difficulties.”
Many emergency workers acknowledged, however, that time was running out for the 14,000 people still buried in the far-flung towns and cities that were devastated by the earthquake.
The government said it was also investigating why so many school buildings fell, killing as many as 7,000 students and teachers. It promised to mete out harsh punishment if any wrongdoing was involved.
“If quality problems do exist in the school buildings, we will deal with the persons responsible strictly with no toleration,” Ha Jin, an official with the Ministry of Education, told the state-run news media.
The government response, by many accounts, has been massive, with more than 110 helicopters airlifting survivors and dropping food and medicine to a score of mountain villages that remain inaccessible. Throughout the region, tens of thousands of soldiers could be seen marching along the road with picks and shovels slung across their shoulders.
A few clambered over the remains of homes spraying disinfectant, a tacit acknowledgment that many of the dead would remain entombed for days to come.
In a departure from its earlier insistence that it could handle the catastrophe on its own, China began accepting outside help on Friday.
Search-and-rescue teams from Russia, South Korea, Japan and Singapore have been arriving with sniffer dogs, high-tech listening devices and hydraulic spreaders. The United States agreed to provide Chinese authorities with satellite images of the earthquake zone and two planeloads of relief supplies.
Officials remain particularly worried about a series of weakened dams that threaten thousands of people in Wenchuan and Beichuan, the counties closest to the epicenter.
“By now, scientists and the government still cannot estimate the losses to dams and other infrastructure,” said Liu Weixin, an urban development specialist at the China Society of Urban Economy in Beijing. “The government said two dams around Chuanbei were destroyed, but they cannot estimate the loss exactly. And one of China’s biggest dams, the Dujian Dam, is still unknown, and that’s the biggest concern.”
Then there is the threat of disease. With four million damaged structures and 400,000 people homeless, many of them cut off from clean water, survivors remain huddled under plastic sheeting, the makeshift shelters lining roads all across the region. Thousands of others have been flocking to urban refugee centers.
The city of Shifang alone is housing 50,000 people in 26 tent cities. On Friday night, 2,000 people were spread out on a sea of blankets that covered the town square. People lay in the dark as teenage volunteers handed out clothing and bottled water. The mood was almost festive.
“We’re just happy to be alive,” said Zhang Xingyong, 19, who escaped the collapse of his school. He said about 300 classmates were not so lucky.
At the Dongfang turbine factory, the largest employer in the city of Hanwang, hundreds of soldiers tried to disentangle the steel and concrete innards of several hangar-like buildings. Company officials said 160 people were still beneath the debris; 378 people have been confirmed dead, more than half of them students in the factory-run school.
As a group of soldiers stood taking a cigarette break near a pair of crushed bicycles, an elderly woman stood alone, the tell-tale look of loss on her face. It was the third day that Zhou Fu Ren had walked three hours each way to stand vigil at the plant. She said she still held out hope that her son would be found alive. “He’s my only child,” she said.
Down the road, in a park littered with children’s shoes and playing cards, a dozen women sat on bamboo chairs, staring in the direction of a seven-story building that had once teemed with apartments and the offices of mining company.
One of the women, Fan Yu Fen, had bloodshot eyes, and her arms bore the telltale scrapes of a survivor. “My husband is still over there,” she said numbly. She explained that she had been taking a nap when the earthquake struck. She huddled against a wall until the rumbling stopped; her husband ran down the stairs. “On the second day, we could still hear people crying for help,” she said. “Now they’ve stopped.”
Then she leapt up from her chair and started marching toward the pile, but a man in army fatigues stopped her, saying it was too dangerous to go closer. “I don’t understand,” she wailed as her relatives pulled her back to the playground. “Why can’t the government do something?”
Another woman sat nearby, dazed by her own grief. She gave only her surname, Dai, and said her husband of 27 years was lost in the same building. The couple has a grown daughter in Singapore but she said she had yet tell her anything. Asked if she had any hope for her husband, she shook her head slowly. “The last few days I did,” she said, “but now I don’t know.”
Elsewhere, on the roads between the disaster areas and Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province, convoys of ambulances, army trucks and civilian cars carrying aid supplies roared up and down. Local residents organized their own relief caravans, with red banners pasted onto cars that said, “Anti-Earthquake Disaster Relief.” Bulldozers also rumbled along the roadways. The scope of the civilian mobilization appeared to rival that of the military’s.
Indeed the huge rescue effort has also been aided by an enormous outpouring of private donations and blood and donation drives in Beijing and other cities all over China. The government said more than $200 million had been donated to relief efforts, including large donations from corporations around the world.
The government says it has also started to try to find homes for orphans of the earthquake, repeating a similar plan that was instituted in 1976 after 240,000 people were killed by a huge earthquake in the city of Tangshan.
The government says adoption applications have risen this week, and have included an offer from an orphanage in Tangshan to take in up to 200 children.
David Barboza contributed reporting from Beijing, and Ed Wong from Shifang, China.
