Wenchuan Quake

When the earth moved

By Hu Yinan (China Daily)
Updated: 2011-06-01 08:31

Top: Rescuers succeed in saving 14-year-old Gao Ying after six hours of effort from the debris of Juyuan Town Middle School in Dujiangyan city, Sichuan province, on May 13, 2008. Above left: A rescuer checks a collapsed building for survivors in Wenchuan, Sichuan, on May 15, 2008. Above right: Children play in front of their reconstructed houses at Yongquan village, Deyang city, Sichuan, in May 2009. Top: Xu Jingxing / China Daily; above left: Zhou Chao / For China Daily; above right: Guo Guoquan / For China Daily

At 2:28 pm on May 12, 2008, an 8.0-magnitude quake struck Sichuan province. Towns were leveled and villages were buried, as mountains crumbled into rivers and dammed them to further threaten residents. Many survivors said that the worst was yet to come. In Chongqing, China's former wartime capital (1937-45) that stands hundreds of kilometers away from the epicenter, the tremor woke Li Guifang, 68, from her nap. Li's immediate thought was to rush down the apartment stairs and shout: "Take cover, sisters! The Japanese (invaders) are here again!"

About 200 km to the north, in Sichuan's Nanchong city, retirees Song Xuanzhong and his wife Yang Junxiu were anxious to get hold of their only child Yanmei, who was working at a cosmetics store in Chengdu, the provincial capital.

In a province with 80 million residents, the couple in their 60s found it impossible to reach their daughter by phone at a time when millions outside Sichuan were calling home to find friends and relatives.

The next morning, they hired a van and rushed to Chengdu, 230 km to the west. The city remained relatively intact, but that was hardly good news for the aging couple, who learned that Yanmei, 20, had been on a work trip to Yingxiu township of Wenchuan county - the quake epicenter - since May 11.

All roads to Yingxiu were shut and all communication lost. The military, with the best of its men throughout the country, was struggling to make its way into the town amid constant aftershocks and landslides.

Determined to reach Yanmei, Song and Yang trekked the same hillside roads the soldiers were marching on and made it to Yingxiu at around 7 am on May 15. They located the beauty salon Yanmei was at when the tremor reduced the town into rubbles.

As she and her husband removed broken bricks with their bare hands atop what was once the ground floor of a five-story building, Yang called Yanmei's name again and again.

Minutes later, Yanmei responded. She was on the second floor when the quake struck. The building collapsed as she ran down the stairs. Her right leg was caught between bricks.

As Yang burst into tears of happiness, a company of 90 men from the "Iron Army" division of the People's Liberation Army's Jinan Military Area Command rushed to the scene. The globally recognized "72-hour golden chance" for those trapped after an earthquake to survive was quickly coming to an end, and the soldiers were busy searching around town for remaining signs of life. The men quickly dug a hole around where Yanmei was buried. But the opening could only fit a teenager. A 165-cm-tall soldier named An Le volunteered.

For An, then 19, the army offered the best career. Many of his playmates in An's impoverished village in central Henan province were enlisted. His elder brother, too, was an army man. An said he always believed he could become somebody.

On that day, he did.

Amid more than 100 aftershocks, the young man went down the hole three times to feed Yanmei and encourage her. He refused the company commander's order to amputate the girl's limb before digging her out.

Piece by piece, with a metal hook, An dug, scratched and sliced bricks. After a 300-minute rescue effort, Yanmei was pulled out at 2:05 pm that day - about 72 hours after the quake.

An, who was also among the first soldiers to reach Yingxiu, was later hailed as a national model in quake relief in Beijing, an extremely rare honor for an ordinary soldier.

Yanmei, meanwhile, was transferred to a hospital in Hefei, capital of Anhui province, in June 2008. She underwent two surgeries there. But it was not until her mother found her a well-known senior doctor did she start to feel her right leg again.

The Sichuan earthquake was China's worst natural disaster in 32 years. The direct economic cost of the earthquake was almost 980 billion yuan ($140 billion), more than twice the country's GDP at the start of economic reforms in 1979. Figures from the Ministry of Civil Affairs show that 87,150 people were left dead or missing. Many bodies were never found.

The State Council, China's Cabinet, twinned each severely affected county with one of 19 provinces or municipalities, which were required to donate at least 1 percent of their annual fiscal revenue toward reconstruction projects until 2011.

The reconstruction of areas affected by the Sichuan earthquake, which officials say are the grandest in Chinese history, was basically completed in September 2010, a year ahead of the originally planned three-year schedule.

Experts say several legacies of the earthquake have contributed to positive social change.

These legacies include a flourishing volunteer spirit, Internet-based mobilization for collective efforts, officials' increasing use of online resources (the China International Search and Rescue team opened a micro blog, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, in February 2010), and a rising awareness of people's mental health.

Efforts to offer counseling to survivors were more than sufficient in the first months following the earthquake, when self-sponsored individuals and groups flooded Sichuan.

Liu Meng, a mental therapist with the Mental Health Center at the Hebei University of Economics and Business, is one of them. He arrived in Sichuan a week after the disaster, and has stayed there ever since.

"Mental assistance is a systematic, long-term effort. Those who receive it will suffer a second blow if you stop along the way," says Liu, 37.

His team of hundreds of grassroots volunteers has set up mental aid centers in communities and schools throughout Sichuan. The team's primary focus, though, is on mothers who lost their children in the tremor and were willing to become pregnant again.

Since late 2008, Liu has been running the Home of Mothers in Dujiangyan, helping hundreds of desperate mothers. These mothers are a particularly vulnerable group, because what many sought in the new child are, in effect, "replicates" of the ones they lost.

"Subconsciously, they haven't accepted the fact their children are dead. They always tend to think that the kids are in another place, out camping or going to school, and that they will eventually come back - they just don't know how yet," Liu says.

(China Daily 06/01/2011 page65)