5.12.08 7.8M Earthquake in Sichuan China; Maybe I’m not so bad off after all

from www.youtube.com posted with vodpod

 

This video was actually taken by a student in his dorm room during the earthquake.  Last I heard, the magnitude of the quake had been re-estimated as 7.9 on the Richter scale.  The shock was felt as far away as Beijing, and as many as 313 aftershocks have been reported.

This, coming so soon after the Myanmar cyclone disaster raises a lot of concerns in my mind about aftereffects.  I can remember back in 2004/5, taking our Christmas vacation in England, and waking after a miserable day of jet lag to find that there had been a massive tsunami in southeast Asia.  Every day, we went out and did the tourist thing, every night, we’d come back to home base and hang on the latest news on the ticker about damages and casualties.  A lot of our spare change that trip went into tsunami relief collections, which it seems were being organized in every pub and tearoom across the country.

This is going to take just as massive a relief effort, if not more.  It will be interesting to watch the news as it comes out.  Where is most of the relief going to come from, will China let foreign aid workers in to assist, as Myanmar apparently is unwilling to do?  And if not, how is the food and water and medical supplies and such going to be transported in?  Reports on the news seem to indicate that communication to some areas is largely cut off and roads into and out of the area are blocked by landslides.

There’s a horridly fascinating photo-essay/slide show to be seen here:  http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24578006/displaymode/1107/s/2/framenumber/1/

Some quotes from the MSNBC story:

“In the town of Juyuan, south of the epicenter, a three-story high school collapsed, burying as many as 900 students and killing at least 50, Xinhua said. Photos showed people using cranes, mechanical hoists and their hands to remove slabs of concrete and steel. As many as 2,300 people were still buried under rubble, Xinhua said.

Teenagers struggled to break free from the rubble, “while others were crying out for help,”  Xinhua said. Families waited in the rain near the wreckage as rescuers wrote the names of the dead on a blackboard, the news agency reported.

Parents of the dead students built makeshift religious altars at the site, resting the corpses on any available piece of plywood or cardboard, and burning paper money and incense in a traditional honor for their child in the afterlife, according to NPR’s Melissa Block. “

“The earthquake hit one of the last homes of the giant panda at the Wolong Nature Reserve and panda breeding center, in Wenchuan county, which remained out of contact”

“About 600 people died in Shifang city, which was the site of a major chemical leak. The Xinhua report did not say whether people were killed by the quake or the chemical leak.”

I wonder if people in Asia watched with just such fascination as the reports of the devastation Hurricaine Katrina visited on New Orleans and the south Gulf Coast came slowly out of the area hardest hit?

Suddenly being unemployed and on relief seems pretty petty by comparison…