The amazing and intrepid and bold Shai Oster, who we kast spoke to upon his return from Lhasa.
'Anyone Still in a Building Is Dead'
Volunteers Hunt for Survivors
In the Rubble of Beichuan
By SHAI OSTER
May 16, 2008
BEICHUAN, China -- It was hard to see the foot. It was wedged underneath a boulder that the earthquake had tossed against a building. Under the rock and attached to the foot was a man, still alive.
The earthquake hit Sichuan province on Monday, killing more than 22,000 -- and officials say the toll could reach 50,000. One of the worst-affected areas was Beichuan. Nestled among tea plantations, it had been a pretty place, a county with a town center of whitewashed walls and gray-tiled roofs.
Shai Oster
The approach to Beichuan is slowed by damage to roadways.
I had come to Beichuan via a circuitous route, a journey that took me through the various phases of destruction meted out by the earth's crust.
About 50 miles away was the city of Mianyang, home to about one million people and a nuclear research center. By Tuesday, Mianyang's airport had reopened and journalists were able to fly in. The city was surprisingly intact. Through the light rain, new apartment blocks gleamed, surrounded by pretty squares.
But the streets were lined with makeshift tents made of everything from umbrellas to tarps. Hundreds of people huddled under overpasses or sat in cars. No one dared go indoors.
Outside the city's main hospital, rows of blue tents had been set up to treat the overflow from the packed hospital. Occasionally an ambulance raced to the front gate and medics rushed another patient out. A doctor said he had been working non-stop since the quake hit. The hospital had 1,000 beds. He said all of them were full.
Nearby, in People's Park, a group of nursing students from hard-hit Deyang and Mianzhu crowded together. They had made a shelter of cardboard, banner ads, sheets of plastic and sodden blankets. After the quake hit, the school told them to go home, so they left quickly, borrowing clothes and money from classmates. But they weren't sure where to go. They seemed shocked and sat around trying to call home.
Shai Oster
The rubble of Beichuan lies in the distance.
"My parents are OK, but every building around them was destroyed," said Chen Keming, a 21-year-old student. "I haven't heard from my cousin. She was in a school that collapsed. I heard that 200 died there."
That morning, Mr. Chen had donated blood. His classmates were turned away from the blood bank because they were too thin.
I left to buy dinner, and brought back 10 plastic bags filled with rice noodles in chicken broth. (The roadside noodle stand had run out of bowls.) The students took turns eating out of the two bowls they were able to borrow, teasing each other about who ate too slowly. It was their first hot meal in two days. They had no idea what they would do next.
I spent that night at a simple guesthouse where the manager reluctantly let me and another reporter stay. All the other hotels were closed, although electricity and water had been restored. The manager slept at the desk downstairs. In an adjacent rice porridge shop, people slept on the tables.
Shai Oster
A rescue team outside of Beichuan carries a child.
Around midnight there was an aftershock, as if the building had been hit by a sharp blast. I didn't run out of the building, but I did pack my backpack. I guess my instinct to get organized first would have killed me in a bigger quake. I then left my bag packed and put a glass of water on the edge of the dresser as a homemade earthquake alert.
The next morning, I headed out with another journalist to try to find a way to Beichuan, where we had heard at least half of the residents had died. Early government death tolls indicated about a third of those killed in the quake were from Beichuan. None of the local taxis would take us -- the cars run on compressed natural gas and the drivers said they couldn't get enough fuel.
At Mianyang's city hall, rescuers had set up a headquarters and a volunteer registration center. A city official came out and talked to us in perfect English. (He had lived in Canada for three years.) He'd returned from Beichuan at 5 a.m. and looked tired and drawn.
"The two mountains around the valley collapsed," he said, mimicking the motion with his hands and then giving us his report: At least half of Beichuan's people were missing. They had found 2,000 bodies so far and a few thousand survivors. The army was working to clear the road into town but still had about six miles of landslides to get past.
Shai Oster
Some buildings in Beichuan remained standing while those next to them were reduced to rubble.
We made our way to Mianyang's main gymnasium. Outside, hundreds of survivors were hiking across muddy lanes and pouring out of flatbed trucks. About 10,000 refugees were already inside. One weathered-looking woman with a bloodied bandage on her head rummaged through a pile of donated clothing. She'd come from Beichuan with her husband and two-year-old son.
"We ran like mad," she said. "Anyone still in a building is dead."
Finally we found a taxi that would take us to Beichuan. The road wove past the poorer outskirts of Mianyang toward the mountains. Only a few miles out, the destruction was worse: We saw rows of shattered cinderblock that were once buildings, their roofs caved in and people lining up with buckets next to water trucks.
More than halfway to Beichuan, police at a roadblock stopped our car. Only rescue vehicles and those with special permission could go farther. We left our taxi and joined a group of four farmers from Henan province who had been traveling for two straight days hoping to help out. We hiked up the winding road past dazed survivors and villages that seemed made of broken shingles and snapped wood.
An hour later, another roadblock. Police were letting Chinese reporters past, but not foreign media. Officials from the local foreign-affairs office, a government agency in charge of foreign media in the region, said they were worried about our safety. Finally they relented.
Past the roadblock, every village we saw had been flattened. We passed a body wrapped in a tarp. Two men pushed a bicycle, a wrapped body draped across it. One arm dangled, leaving a path in the dust.
We walked uphill with two men who had strapped crates of bottled water and food to bicycles. They lived in the coastal boomtown of Shenzhen, where they ran a small company. They had family in nearby villages and were intent on bringing them some relief.
Shai Oster
A car crushed by boulders was barely recognizable.
Closer to the Beichuan county seat, the road entered a narrow valley. Hundreds of soldiers and paramilitary police sat in trucks or ate bowls of instant noodles, waiting to be deployed. Onions, potatoes and giant winter melons were stacked next to the road.
We reached the Beichuan Middle School, which had collapsed onto hundreds of students. Soldiers ran by with a person on a stretcher. More refugees trudged by, dazed and covered in dust. Others waited by the roadside for a ride.
Chinese media had already set up operations with a generator powering a satellite feed. Rescue crews' banners were displayed on the side of vehicles. The grounds around the destroyed school had been converted into a field office and field headquarters.
Past a bend in the road, the road and the activity abruptly stopped. The heart of Beichuan was in the valley below. It looked like a black-and-white photo of Germany after the war. A landslide had crushed a third of the town. Whatever was still standing leaned at impossible angles. In between were mountains of rubble. House-sized boulders blocked the road.
Sitting on the side of the road, in orange jumpsuits, was an exhausted search-and-rescue crew from Jiangsu province. Its members had worked for hours in the rubble below and then hiked out an hour to rest in the relative safety above the valley. Thinking of what he'd seen, one man shook his head and then said, "I'm a firefighter. I'm trained to do this." An exhausted soldier cradling a 5-year-old girl walked by. She hung limply in his arms, her face covered with a shirt. She was alive.
A path skirted the biggest boulders, then led to a muddy slope where ropes had been tied to trees. Rescue crews had to bring up the injured along this ragged slope and then past jagged boulders.
Shai Oster
The earthquake sheared a street in a nearly straight line.
We descended into the quiet below. A group of volunteers called for help to carry a stretcher up. No one seemed to be in command of the situation. I wasn't sure if I was missing a broader plan, or if this was part of the logistical difficulties.
Further down, buildings seemed to have been smashed by a giant hand. Houses were ripped in half. An apartment block that had been spared stood next to another that had been reduced to nothing. The roads were blocked by stones, or split apart. Outside the central bus station, a volunteer said people were still alive, trapped inside. He vowed not to leave until they were saved.
I heard a rescuer shouting toward a rock. Peeking out was the foot. The rock had landed atop a crevice next to a building. Under the rock, suspended upside down in the crevice, was a man, alive. He had been there for two days.
"I'm going to die," he moaned.
A few steps farther, trapped under rocks, were more bodies, some headless. I nearly stepped on a corpse. A woman sat atop a collapsed building sobbing a name, again and again.
It was six and soon would be getting dark. I didn't want to be stuck trying to climb out then.
We passed the rock again. A Spanish photographer refused to leave the man trapped underneath the rock until he could convince rescuers to come. He called down in Chinese: "Help is coming."
Exhausted, I pushed on. I didn't find out the name of the pinned man. I wasn't brave enough -- or rude enough, or wise enough -- to stop and ask.
Write to Shai Oster at shai.oster@wsj.com
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