SOBBING uncontrollably, Liu Zhi Gao, a 35-year-old mother, knelt alone in the
wreckage of the school playground in the devastated town of Hanwang. In
front of her lay the collapsed shell of the four-storey school building,
reduced to a heap of crushed concrete, bricks and twisted metal.
Then she stretched her arms out towards a pair of small legs in pink trousers
dangling from the top of the only standing section of wall. “That’s my
10-year-old daughter, Du Jing,” she sobbed. “I can’t get her down. I can’t
get to my daughter. Help me please, somebody please help me!’
Hoarse after four days of shouting and crying, Liu told us Du Jing had been
alive and conscious for two days after the earthquake that brought her
school crashing down last Monday afternoon.
Pinned by her right arm and shoulder to a section of an upper floor classroom
by a large chunk of concrete, the girl was unable to wriggle free. “Mummy,
Mummy, my arm hurts,” she shouted down to her helpless parents in the
schoolyard. “I’m frightened, Mummy, help me,’ she said, again and again.
Without ladders, machines or professional rescuers, Du Jing’s parents had no
means to pull their daughter free. A group of men managed to climb to the
top of the perilously balanced section of wall and reach out to the girl but
they were unable to tug her trapped shoulder free.
Her parents called to her day and night. They told her to hold on for the
rescue teams and to keep breathing. By the time help finally arrived 48
hours after the earthquake struck, the legs had stopped moving.
“She’s dead,” Liu Zhi Gao sobbed, covering her mouth with shaking hands and
staring up at her daughter’s body.
“Why did no one come to help me? Where was everyone?” she pleaded, tears
streaming down her face. “Du Jing was my only daughter. She was a happy and
clever child and now she’s dead and I have nothing left.”
Despite the soldiers and recovery teams swarming through the town, no one had
yet helped Liu to get the body down. A lone JCB digger crashed ineffectually
against the piles of bricks that marked the only exit to the main building,
where most of the 300 pupils were buried alive.
Hanging back from the scene, a small group of local people told us in hushed
voices that the girl’s father had walked away in despair when he saw that
his daughter was finally dead. No one knows where he went.
In the distance the green mountains stretched out on the horizon, shrouded in
mist. Around the townsfolk thick clouds of dust had settled on pile after
pile of debris. The stink of rotting vegetables in the midday heat mingled
with the putrid smell of three decomposing bodies lying covered with sheets
and a swarm of flies on the road nearby.
A handful of dazed survivors picked vacantly through pieces of their broken
homes, watched by listless young soldiers sent to guard a cordoned-off area
of collapsed road.
It was a scene repeated across China’s western Sichuan province, which was
shattered by the powerful earthquake measuring 7.9 on the Richter scale. As
in most of the affected areas, the toll of school-age children in Hanwang
was devastatingly high. Rescuers say six of the seven schools in the town
were badly damaged. They estimate that 60% to 70% of the children never made
it out alive.
Officials say they have already counted 6,900 classrooms destroyed across the
region, but many more have yet to be unearthed. As many as 40% of the
casualties in China’s worst natural disaster for 30 years may be children.
News that education authorities have promised a full investigation into the
large number of collapsed schools will come as little comfort to parents who
are already mourning over their children’s graves.
Moving from one destroyed town to another last week, I was greeted everywhere
by distraught mothers, fathers, uncles, aunts and grandparents wielding
crumbling bricks between their hands and pleading for answers.
Cut and bleeding from pulling at the rubble with their bare hands, they
described panic as survivors tried to rip away the debris smothering lost
children.
One woman in Beichuan, a town close to the epicentre of the quake, was seen
pouring milk through gaps in the stone to where she thought she had heard
her child call for help.
Slowly but surely, grief is mingling with anger, even though the disaster
would have daunted any government’s response teams. The earthquake wrecked
an area the size of Belgium and rescue attempts were seriously hampered by
blocked roads and landslides.
Official publicity for the relief operation was an impressive change from the
days when Chinese officials routinely covered up disasters. Scenes of
soldiers pulling people out alive from rubble have been beamed across the
world and given hope to the families still searching for loved ones.
On the ground, however, the reality has not been as smooth as the television
images. Three days after the quake struck, troops and fire engines queued
idly along the roadsides waiting for orders.
In Mianzhu, a base for soldiers heading into the disaster zone, hundreds of
lines of army rucksacks with gleaming new shovels strapped to them lay
neatly in rows on the floor, even though just a mile away villagers were
still using broken buckets to shift debris because they had nothing to dig
with.
“An earthquake might be a natural disaster but nearly all the deaths are
man-made,” said Li Yan, 33, who lost her 12-year-old daughter Yang Dan when
the middle school in her village Wu Su, northeast of Chengdu, collapsed
killing about 200 of the 309 pupils inside.
The Sunday Times was the first foreign newspaper to reach the town after the
quake struck. We were mobbed by groups of villagers begging us to report
what had happened to their children. Through tears, parents told us that the
school where their children had died was only 10 years old but it had been
ruled unsafe by local officials more than a year ago.
They claimed that about 300,000 renminbi (£22,000) had been put aside to build
the school, but said that the local officials in charge of construction had
creamed off a significant proportion for themselves.
Middle-school children were relocated after the safety ruling. But on
September 30, primary-age pupils were moved back into the building because
the three-storey structure was thought to look more impressive than their
single-storey primary school.
“Look at these bricks. Look at this concrete. Look at these metal wires,” the
men shouted in fury as they showed us round piles of broken plaster and
crumbling brickwork, still strewn with school rucksacks spilling home-work
and packed lunch boxes.
Nearby the cabins where classes had been held during the safety alert stood
intact.
None of the 80 children having lessons on the ground floor of the school were
pulled out of the rubble alive. With no foundations to offer support, walls
caved in on the pupils before they had a chance to leave their desks. More
than 100 others were buried on top of them and died in the time that it took
their parents to dig them out.
Children who did escape claimed that the teachers had run out without helping
them.
As news of our presence spread, weeping parents brandishing pictures of their
children from family photograph albums clamoured to tell their stories. Each
wore their child’s school name card round their neck.
“I last saw Yang Dan at 7.30 on the morning she died,” sobbed Li Yan. “She
said, ‘Good-bye Mamma’, as she left for school. When she got to the corner
of the road she turned round and said it again. When I pulled her body out
of the rubble that night it was unrecognisable.’”
According to her parents, the girl had wanted to be a doctor when she grew up.
“She knew we couldn’t afford to send her to medical school, so she said she
would work hard and win a scholarship. She was a golden student and teachers
had already recommended her for the best high school in the region. When we
went through her belongings after she died we found over 600 renminbi (£44)
in coins she was secretly saving to go to university one day.”
Since the nearest crematorium was damaged in the quake, her parents buried her
in a shallow grave in the field behind their house. Balanced on top of the
large mound of fresh earth, they have placed a giant teddy bear and her
favourite toy tortoise.
“The government told us the fewer kids we had, the happier and more prosperous
we’d be,” her father Yan Guilin, 37, said quietly, wiping tears from his
eyes. “We followed their instructions and now look where we are. Our only
child is dead and our family is ruined.”
Parents in the village said that when Chinese reporters came to the scene they
refused to go into the playground and added that local officials had lied
openly about the number of children who had died there.
As the dust settles and the adrenaline of the rescue effort is replaced with
the slow and painful task of reconstruction, the Chinese authorities will be
forced to face some uncomfortable truths.
In the meantime, help is desperately needed. “We’ve got enough medicine but we
need more orthopaedic specialists to help us treat all the crush injuries
and broken bones,” said Sarah Mellis, a 26-year-old American volunteer at
the local hospital, who described the initial chaos.
“I saw a doctor walking along the lines of bloody bodies, checking pulses and
looking at wounds. If he shook his head the nurses were instructed not to
take the person to the operating theatre but move them to another room to
die. It was like a scene from a war film,” she said.
Yet the worst is over now and the mood in the recovery room is quietly
hopeful. I found nine-year-old Zhao Feng sitting up in bed, with 100
stitches across his forehead, looking at newspaper pictures of his flattened
home town.
“We can’t believe how lucky we are that our wonderful son is still with us,
but our hearts are heavy with sadness for all the parents and children left
without their loved ones,” his father said. “Today China grieves for our
future as so many lives have been destroyed.”
Video: Premier
Wen visits school where children were still trapped at Shifang
Video: Children
being rescued from schools in Dujiangyan
when the disaster happended, all the chinese people are united ,fighting it . it is impossible for our chinese to turn back to it ,even the soilders or armies .we exactly know what need to do .
sun , beijing , China
I don't know where Belen of London get's his or her information from but it is erroneous. The area of the quake is extremely mountainous and many roads were impassable after landslides blocked the roads. The response from the Chinese Government and the Chinese people has been truly amazing.
L Hender, Zhangzhou, China
"Three days after the quake struck, troops and fire engines queued idly along the roadsides waiting for orders. "
This is the time to have some initiative!
Belen, London, UK