12-May-2008 08:19:34 PM (GMT) CHENGDU, China (AP) _ A powerful earthquake toppled buildings, schools and a chemical plant in central China on Monday, killing more than 8,700 people and trapping untold numbers in mounds of concrete, steel and earth in the worst quake in three decades. The 7.9-magnitude quake devastated a region of small cities and towns set amid steep hills north of Sichuan's provincial capital of Chengdu. Striking in mid-afternoon, it emptie d office buildings across the country in Beijing, could be felt as far away as Vietnam and in Chengdu crashed telephone networks and hours later left parts of the city of 10 million in darkness. The official Xinhua News Agency reported 8,533 people died in Sichuan alone and 216 others in three other provinces and the mega-city of Chongqing. Worst affected were four counties including the quake's epicenter in Wenchuan, 60 miles (100 kilometers) northwest of Chengdu. Landslides blocked the roads early Tuesday, causing the government to order soldiers into the area on foot, state television said, while heavy rains prevented four military helicopters from landing. Snippets from state media and photos posted on the Internet underscored the immense scale of the devastation. In Juyuan town, south of the epicenter, a high school collapsed, burying as many as 900 students and killing at least 50, Xinhua said. Photos showed people using cranes, mechanical hoists a nd their hands to remove slabs of concrete and steel. Xinhua described buried teenagers struggling to break free from the rubble ``while others were crying out for help.'' Families waited in the rain near the wreckage, as rescuers wrote the names of the dead on a blackboard, Xinhua said. To the east, in Beichuan county, 80 percent of the buildings collapsed, and 10,000 people were injured aside from 3,000 to 5,000 dead, Xinhua said. It and other state media said a chemical plant in Shifang city cratered, burying hundreds of people and spilling more than 80 tons of toxic liquid ammonia from the site. Though slow to release information at first, the government and its state media ramped up quickly. Nearly 20,000 soldiers, police and reservists were sent to the disaster area, with some going on foot because roads were impassable. Disasters always pose a test to the communist government, whose mandate rests heavily on maintaining order, delivering eco nomic growth and providing relief in emergencies. Pressure for a rapid response was particularly intense this year, as the government was already grappling with public discontent over high inflation and a widespread uprising among Tibetans in western China while trying to prepare for the Beijing Olympics this August.
yea i know very saddening, the death toll risen to above 12000 now and still 18000 predicted who are buried underneath the debris waiting to be rescued.
its up to 12k at the moment...u know what bothers me most about this... how come this isnt front page news everywhere??? remember when there was a hurricane in US and it was all over the fuckin place.... or those tibetans jumping up n down about freedom yada yada yada.... n now...so many ppl died....n its not even on front page on e.g. www.smh.com.au ive checked some dutch websites too....not there either... i remember when that tibetan shit was going on everyone kept on going on about it...n asking me how i felt about it...wtf... now 12k ppl died and its like... no ones even mentioning it... n this is whywestern media stinks....!!! fuck this really bothers me...!! sooo annoying n not even cuz its happening in china this is just a perfect example to show how fucked the media is anyways....this is the downside of 1 child policy eh... so many students died... u can imagine the tragedy...n u can imagine... if u only have one child now... this is so bad :( RIP
"DUJIANGYAN, China (AFP) - More than 50,000 people are dead, missing or buried under rubble after China's devastating earthquake, officials said Wednesday as the full horror of the disaster began to emerge." an update from Yahoo! its gone up to over 50,000 people now! >.<
and the place to help out : https://ssl.charityweb.net/mercycorps/giftbasket/donation.htm?pDonorIntent=ChinaEarthquake https://american.redcross.org/site/Donation2?idb=1651752378&df_id=3198&3198
this is really terrible. i was really sad reading about those ppl in myanmar suffering before this happened. i really wish i could do something (like joining mercy or something? but mercy said they need doctors and nurses right now). i really hope tht they could find those trapped underneath asap. there are so many things happening to the world lately...food shortage,earthquake,typhoon,inflation,economy downturn. it's really sad to see the place we live is becoming a place of mess. most of this are man made and in the end, those tht made this eventually will suffer together with the rest =(
yeah..i know. but no harm giving hopes coz there are alot of cases in earthquakes where victims are trapped there for one week and still alive. just hoping for the best for them...
sigh, i wonder wha'ts taking them so long into asking the US and other national countries for help, the only ones who've sent help so far is HK and korea, ithink, others have offered, but i think the roads are too messed up to get anywhere into the mainland, and there's all these issues about letting all these international Red Cross teams come
I had shivers n goosebumps all oer my body when i read this article in the newspaper this morning.... the song "fairy tale" has a total different meaning to me now....so sad John Garnaut in Mianyang, China May 15, 2008 LI ANLING was studying for a stressful physics exam when her five-storey high school in Sichuan province swayed, rocked back and collapsed. The 16-year-old felt herself fall through four floors to land in a tangle with her schoolmates, teachers and bits of building. There was just enough light and space to make out her friend, Li Yuanfeng. She tugged his clothing but he didn't speak. She held his warm hand but it didn't respond. From the light of a torch poked through a hole from outside she could see three other dead schoolfriends next to her. Then a classmate yelled from the darkness behind: "Hey, grade 1 class 7, as soon as we get out we'd better study hard." And another voice replied: "Forget that, I'm going to quit." A student began to sob, but other voices sang out to her not to cry because they were all in there together. And all those who still had voices started to sing Chinese pop songs. They returned again and again to the last line of Guang Liang's Fairy Tale, which goes "happiness and joy, the end". Li Anling is now safely in the care of Mianyang Central Hospital with the other miracle survivors from Beichuan No.1 Middle School. The hospital hallways, stairways and even its outdoor car park are filled with students wrapped in bloodied bandages and connected to intravenous tubes. Most Beichuan students never made it that far. Many were killed on Monday, at 2.28pm. Some were pulled alive from the debris but died in the makeshift wards. One middle-aged couple clung to each other, distraught, after just being given the worst news a a parent could receive. But there were also children who were missing limbs who were joking around. Fifteen-year-old Chen Bangyu told how he was first down the stairs of Pingtong Middle School, swatting bits of wall and window away from his head as he ran. Smiling, he said he made it out the door and had gestured madly with his left hand before realising it was not there. A second later he turned and saw the building collapse behind him. When the earthquake struck, Chen's geography class had been reciting the names of China's famous mountains and rivers. Eleven of his classmates were pulled out alive. The other 33 are dead. All along the main streets of Mianyang, the province's second-largest town, are the merely homeless. They huddle against each other under dripping roofs made of striped plastic sheet. Rows of umbrellas protect their protruding feet from the drenching rain. Some sleep in impossible positions, or pretend to, and nobody complains. From one row of makeshift tents along the river bank comes the incongruent sound of popular music. A group of nursing students are clustered around the table with a couple of newly homeless managers from a Korean electronics factory. They have fixed up a light and table, on top of which is a laptop computer. The machine is streaming music over the internet via a mobile phone and also playing a webcast of the Premier, Wen Jiabao, who is reassuring survivors through his megaphone. And the students and their new corporate friends go back to what looked to be a well-worn topic, debating the body count. with Maya Li Source: http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/a-...to-be-forgotten/2008/05/14/1210444529945.html btw....i read that its up to 40k now...dunno where that other person had 50k from... lets hope there wont be that much more.... so saddening.....
