2008.05.13: May 13, 2008: Headlines: COS - China: Journalism: Hooker: Figures: NY Times: Jake Hooker writes: Powerful Quake Ravages China, Killing Thousands
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2008.05.13: May 13, 2008: Headlines: COS - China: Journalism: Hooker: Figures: NY Times: Jake Hooker writes: Powerful Quake Ravages China, Killing Thousands
Jake Hooker writes: Powerful Quake Ravages China, Killing Thousands
The quake, which was estimated preliminarily to have had a magnitude of 7.9, ravaged a mountainous region outside Chengdu, capital of Sichuan Province, just after lunchtime Monday, destroying 80 percent of structures in some of the towns and small cities near its epicenter, Chinese officials said. Its tremors were felt as far away as Vietnam and set off another, smaller quake in the outskirts of Beijing, 900 miles away. Journalist Jake Hooker was a volunteer in the Peace Corps in China starting in 2000 teaching English at a middle school in Wanxian, a small town along the middle reach of the Yangtze River, near the Three Gorges.
Jake Hooker writes: Powerful Quake Ravages China, Killing Thousands
Powerful Quake Ravages China, Killing Thousands
By JAKE HOOKER and JIM YARDLEY
Published: May 13, 2008
Caption: Girl pulled from rubble after 40hrs Photo: Flickr Creative Commons
CHENGDU, China — A powerful earthquake struck Western China on Monday, toppling thousands of homes, factories and offices, trapping students in schools, and killing at least 10,000 people, the country’s worst natural disaster in three decades.
The quake, which was estimated preliminarily to have had a magnitude of 7.9, ravaged a mountainous region outside Chengdu, capital of Sichuan Province, just after lunchtime Monday, destroying 80 percent of structures in some of the towns and small cities near its epicenter, Chinese officials said. Its tremors were felt as far away as Vietnam and set off another, smaller quake in the outskirts of Beijing, 900 miles away.
Landslides, power failures and fallen mobile phone towers left much of the affected area cut off from the outside world and limited information about the damage. But snapshots of concentrated devastation suggested that the death toll that could rise significantly as rescue workers reached the most heavily damaged areas.
In the town of Juyuan, south of the epicenter in the city of Wenchuan, a school collapsed, trapping 900 students in the rubble and setting off a frantic search for survivors that stretched through the night. Two chemical factories in Shifang were destroyed, spilling 80 tons of toxic liquid ammonia, officials told Chinese state media.
The destruction of a single steam turbine factory in the city of Mianzhu buried “several thousand” people, the state-run Xinhua News Agency reported Tuesday morning.
The quake was already China’s biggest natural disaster since another earthquake leveled the city of Tangshan in eastern China in 1976, leaving 240,000 people dead and posing a severe challenge to the ruling Communist Party, which initially tried to cover up the catastrophe.
This time, officials quickly mobilized 50,000 soldiers to help with rescue efforts, state media said. Prime Minister Wen Jiabao flew to the scene and was shown coordinating disaster response teams from the cabin of his jet.
The prime minister was later shown on national television standing outside the damaged edifice of the Traditional Medicine Hospital in the city of Dujiangyan, shouting encouragement at people trapped in its ruins.
“Hang on a bit longer,” he said. “The troops are rescuing you. As long as there is the slightest hope, we will never relax our efforts.”
The quake was the latest in a series of events that have disrupted China’s planning for the Olympic Games in August, including widespread unrest among the country’s ethnic Tibetan population, which lives in large numbers in the same part of Sichuan Province where the earthquake struck.
The powerful initial quake struck at 2:28 p.m. local time, or 2:28 a.m. Eastern time, near Wenchuan County, according to China’s State Seismological Bureau. Most of the heavy damage appeared to be concentrated in nearby towns, which by Chinese standards are not heavily populated. Chengdu, the largest city in the area, with a population of about 10 million, is about 60 miles away and did not appear to have suffered major damage or heavy casualties.
But officials had yet to describe the impact in Wenchuan itself, which has a population of 112,000 and is home to the Wolong Nature Reserve, the largest panda reserve in China. The town of Beichuan, on the way from Chengdu to Wenchuan, suffered several thousand deaths, state media said.
China’s massive Three Gorges Dam, a few hundred miles east of the earthquake’s epicenter, reported no immediate problems.
At dawn on Tuesday morning in Chengdu, clusters of people were huddled outside, many saying they were too fearful of aftershocks to go indoors. Many wore plastic slickers to protect them from a steady drizzle. Wang Zihong, 35, a businessman from Gansu Province, had spent 12 hours outside his hotel, squatting with others on a street corner.
“It was a terrible shock,” he said. “I couldn’t stand up straight. We were on the second floor and we ran outside.”
Chengdu’s Huaxi Hospital, one of the largest in western China, started receiving patients from surrounding counties on Monday afternoon. By Tuesday morning, 180 patients had arrived from hard-hit surrounding counties.
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