SLIDE SHOW, VIDEO: Hope amid devastation in China

Associated Press

Originally published 04:46 p.m., May 13, 2008
Updated 12:01 p.m., May 14, 2008

Photo by Associated Press

Eight-month pregnant Zhang Xiaoyan, 34, is pulled alive from an apartment that partially collapsed following Monday's powerful earthquake in Dujiangyan, southwestern China's Sichuan province.

Photo by Andy Wong, Associated Press

Earthquake survivors stand in a truck today as they are transferred to a temporary shelter after Monday's powerful 7.9 magnitude earthquake in Mianyang City in Sichuan province, China.

Photo by Jiang Yi/Associated Press

In this photo released by China's Xinhua news agency, a man is trapped in the debris in the earthquake-hit Beichuan County, about 160 kilometers (100 miles) northeast of the epicenter of Wenchuan County, southwest China's Sichuan Province, Tuesday, May 13, 2008. The official death toll after Monday's powerful 7.9 magnitude earthquake rose Tuesday to nearly 12,000, and thousands remained buried or missing.

Photo by Sven Kaestner/Associated Press

Seismologist Guenter Asch explains the graphic display of the heavy Sichuan earthquake in southwest China, shown in red, rendered from the data transmitted by the closest seismic monitoring station on the Indonesian Island of Nias, being displayed at the German Research Center for Geo Sciences, GFZ, in Potsdam, Germany, on Tuesday, May 13, 2008. Only at the GFZ in Potsdam and the US. Geological Survey in Menlo Park/California the data of all seismic monitoring stations worldwide are bundled for scientific research.

Photo by Ng Han Guan/Associated Press

A Chinese man looks at a student who died clutching a pen after the body was retrieved from a school that collapsed in Juyuan, southwestern China's Sichuan province, Tuesday, May 13, 2008. The death toll from a powerful earthquake in China that toppled buildings, schools and chemical plants climbed Tuesday to about 10,000, while untold numbers remained trapped after the country's worst quake in three decades.

HANWANG, China — Rescuers arrived for the first time in the epicenter of China's massive earthquake, scouring flattened mountain villages for thousands of victims and distributing air-dropped supplies to survivors.

The official Xinhua News Agency said some 2,000 soldiers were sent to repair "extremely dangerous" cracks in the Zipingpu Dam upriver from the earthquake-hit city of Dujiangyan.

The government said late today that experts had inspected the dam and declared it safe, according to a statement broadcast on state TV and posted on the Sichuan government Web site.

Still, another report said the reservoir behind the dam was being emptied to relieve pressure on the structure.

"The flow is extremely swift, and the bottom of the reservoir can be seen, showing the riverbed," the state-sponsored Chinese business news magazine Caijing said in a report from the scene that was posted on its Web site.

Four-inch cracks had opened up on top of the dam, and landslides poured down on the hills on either side, the report said.

China's top economic planning body said that the quake had damaged 391 mostly small dams. He Biao, the director of the Aba Disaster Relief headquarters in northern Sichuan province, said there were concerns over dams close to the epicenter.

"Currently, the most dangerous problems are several reservoirs near Wenchuan," he said, according to a transcript on the CCTV Web site.

"There are already serious problems with the Tulong Reservoir on the Min River. It may collapse. If that happens, it would affect several power plants below and be extremely dangerous," he said.

Help also began to arrive by helicopter and on foot in some of the hardest-to-reach areas, where some victims trapped for more than two days under collapsed buildings were still being pulled out alive. But the enormous scale of the devastation meant that resources were stretched thin, and makeshift aid stations and refugee centers were springing up over the disaster area the size of Belgium.

The death toll of nearly 15,000 appeared likely to soar far higher.

Leveled hospitals forced doctors and nurses to treat survivors in the street. Helicopters dropped food and medicine to isolated towns. Mourners burned money before rows of bodies, believing their lost relatives could use it in the afterlife.

Xinhua quoted government officials as saying rescuers who hiked today into the city of Yingxiu in Wenchuan county — the epicenter of the quake — found only 2,300 survivors in the town of about 10,000, with another 1,000 badly hurt.

The official death toll rose today to 14,866, Xinhua said, but it was not immediately clear if that number included the 7,700 reported dead in Yingxiu. In Sichuan province alone, another 25,788 people were buried and 1,405 were missing, provincial vice governor Li Chengyun said, according to Xinhua.

Twelve Americans were found safe near the epicenter of the quake.

A spokeswoman for the World Wildlife Fund said the 12 members of the wildlife group were reached by satellite phone earlier in the day. The team was near the world's most famous panda preserve in Wolong, whose pandas were reported safe Tuesday.

Unlike previous natural disasters in China, official media have reported prominently on the quake and state TV canceled regular programming to run 24-hour coverage.

Scenes of destruction and death have been shown, along with prominent focus on Premier Wen Jiabao, who rushed Monday to Sichuan to oversee the rescue work. He has been shown crawling into collapsed buildings to urge survivors to hang on with impassioned pleas, and seen reassuring children who had lost parents.

Wen was there when one 3-year-old girl trapped for more than 40 hours under the bodies of her parents was pulled to safety today in Beichuan region, Xinhua said.

Rescuers found Song Xinyi on Tuesday morning, but were unable to pull her out right away due to fears the debris above her would collapse. She was fed and shielded from the rain until rescuers extricated her from the rubble.

Elsewhere, a 34-year-old woman who was eight months pregnant was rescued after spending 50 hours under debris in Dujiangyan.

"It's a miracle brought about by us all working together," said Sun Guoli, fire chief of the nearby provincial capital Chengdu, who supervised the rescue.

The show of official empathy was aimed at reassuring the public about the government's response and also showing the world the country is ready to host the Beijing Olympics in August.

Today's leg of the Olympic torch relay in the southeastern city of Ruijin began with a minute of silence.

Pope Benedict XVI said he was praying for the victims.

President Hu Jintao presided over an emergency meeting of the Communist Party's highest body, the second such meeting since the quake happened. Hu, also secretary-general of the party, urged the military, police and others to rush to the disaster area to help.

The death toll from the quake was expected to rise when rescuers reach other towns in Wenchuan county that remained cut off.

"The Communist Party Central Committee has not forgotten this place," Wen said after flying by helicopter to Wenchuan, adding that some 50 injured people had been airlifted from the area.

Relief efforts were aided in their third day by the clearing of storms that had prevented flights over some of the worst-hit towns.

Military helicopters seen flying north over Dujiangyan, and Xinhua said some had airdropped food, drinking water and medicine to Yingxiu.

East of the epicenter in the town of Hanwang, the smell of incense hung over a crowd of sobbing relatives who walked among some 60 bodies wrapped in plastic, some covered with tributes of branches or flowers.

Nearby, rescuers carried more bodies out of a makeshift morgue at the Dongqi sports arena. People from the town and surrounding areas packed into blue tents provided by relief officials. A Western-style clock tower in the town center had stopped at 2:27 — the time the quake hit.

The Mianzhu No. 3 Hospital was obliterated, and the seven-story main Hanwang Hospital collapsed. Surviving medical staff set up a triage center in the driveway of a tire factory, but could only provide basic care.

"The first day hundreds of kids died when a school collapsed.

The rest who came in had serious injuries. There was so little we could do for them," said Zhao Xiaoli, a nurse at Hanwang Hospital.

Emergency vehicle sirens sounded every few minutes. An ambulance drove in, delivering a man pulled from the rubble and covered in dust.

"There will be a lot more people. So many still haven't been found," said Zhao.

Disorienting episodes added to the struggle for survival in much of the disaster zone. The Mianyang city government ordered its 700,000 residents to evacuate all buildings between 4 p.m. and 6 p.m. because an aftershock was predicted.

In Chengdu, water to some parts of the city was cut for repairs, touching off a rumor that the supply was contaminated. People began hoarding water and water pressure citywide dropped before a senior official went on TV to deny anything was wrong.

• May 12, 2008

  2:46 p.m.

  Suggest removal

  joggle writes:

  That's horrible. Hopefully now that China is more prosperous they will be able to afford to build stronger structures next time--although they need to be pretty high-quality to withstand an earthquake of that magnitude.

• May 12, 2008

  3:58 p.m.

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  Seabreezes writes:

  I'm just waiting for the xenophobic/racist comments to start. I may not agree with the Chinese government, but this is terrible.

• May 12, 2008

  4:09 p.m.

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  ToriEllis007 writes:

  Good front page picture. It's good seeing a high ranking government official in sneakers helping with the recovery/cleanup efforts.

• May 12, 2008

  5:10 p.m.

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  jonnyrotten writes:

  Seabreezes

  Why in the world would you expect "xenophobic/racist comments"? This is a horrible tragedy that has nothing to do with politics or ethnicity.

• May 12, 2008

  5:16 p.m.

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  Seabreezes writes:

  I know, johnny. But you read the same posts I do, and there's always at least one jackass that has to spout off about race. I'm actually grateful I didn't see that kind of hate in here today.

• May 13, 2008

  7:18 a.m.

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  FloydHill writes:

  Aren't these the people who torture and kill dogs in huge numbers?

  Karma!!!!

• May 13, 2008

  9 a.m.

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  SteveM writes:

  Seabreezes, I guess the geniuses of that follwed your 5:16 pm post fulfilled your expectations for xenophobic / racist comments after all. I'm guesing based on FloydHill's comments that all the strife in the USA can be attributed to our mass torturing and killing of cows, right? Not that it's true that the Chines mass torture and kill dogs in the first place.

  Anyway, I agree with Seabreeze, this is not a time for xenophobia, this is a time for us to remember the outpouring of world-wide support we received in response to Hurricane Katrina and return the gestures in kind to the people of this devastated region of China. We are not immune to exactly the same sort of disaster considering the New Madrid fault could endure an earthquake of similar magnitude at any moment and devastate the Milwaukee to Little Rock and St. Louis to Memphis region of cities in the central USA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Madr...). So, FloydHill, if you believe in Karma, you might reconsider your comments and the bad Karma they bring to our own nation and our own set of disaster problems and zones. Your cheap ethnocentric joke doesn't help matters.

• May 13, 2008

  11:09 a.m.

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  temurlan writes:

  Double

  "Bonzai" is a Japanese battle cry, cheer of enthusiasm or cheer of triumph. It means something like "may you live for ten thousand years". I may be wrong about that, but regardless, with little kids still buried under buildings, it has no place here.

• May 13, 2008

  11:18 a.m.

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  Chadley25 writes:

  This makes me so very sad... to see human suffering on this scale is just incredibly wrenching, particularly when there's nothing I can do from where I am. I'll definitely donate to the relief efforts, but that seems so tiny in relation to the scale of this disaster.

  I'm glad to see that no one is bashing China's building codes here... because first off, they do have them. This region is known to be prone to earthquakes. But even if a building is constructed to resist a magnitude-7.0 quake -- which is very strong -- a 7.9 quake releases about 30 times more energy. (Unlike the outdated Richter scale, the moment magnitude scale represents a 1,000-fold energy release with each two-number increase, so each whole number increase is roughly a 31.6-fold increase in released energy.) Secondly, a shallow earthquake of this magnitude would lay waste to any city it struck, regardless of earthquake building codes. If a 7.9 quake struck Los Angeles at a shallow depth, it would devastate the city and result in thousands of deaths. This is just sad to me... I feel for these people just as I do for those suffering in Burma.

• May 13, 2008

  12:57 p.m.

  Operageek writes:

  (This comment was removed by the site staff.)

• May 13, 2008

  1:13 p.m.

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  CaptainObvious writes:

  When has Doublechunkycrap showed any empathy or compassion before? Why would she start now?

• May 13, 2008

  2:18 p.m.

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  Zinnia79 writes:

  FloydHill- Are a complete ignorant dumb*ss? I hope some karma will come your way for what you had said about this massive tragedy. There are people dying, suffering and had just lost their whole family..your karma will be ten times greater.

• May 13, 2008

  2:40 p.m.

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  Seabreezes writes:

  And people wondered why I said I was waiting for the racists.....any questions? My heart goes out to the Chinese.

• May 13, 2008

  2:49 p.m.

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  Zinnia79 writes:

  Rest in Peace to all the victims. My sympathy and condolences to their families..I can't even imagine the pain and heartbreak.

• May 14, 2008

  7:22 a.m.

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  98766543221 writes:

  The Chinese government doesn't care about their own people, why should we.
  You liberal hypocrites can spend your own time and money on saving these ignorant peasants.
  ..but you won't, will you.
  It's much easier for you to sit on your fat ass and bash me, than actually lift a finger to help these people.
  If you haven't actually done anything yourself to help them, then STFU

• May 14, 2008

  7:40 a.m.

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  DahmersCookbook writes:

  Bonzai is A lil' tree with A big heart, the Bonzai loss in China is large enough to deplete oxygen output in this concrete jungle.

• May 14, 2008

  10:33 a.m.

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  gs writes:

  Anyone want to check on the nuclear reactors in the area? 60 miles from the epicenter seems kind of close to me. Can anyone say Chernoble?

• May 14, 2008

  11:41 a.m.

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  McGowdog writes:

  Posted by Zinnia79 on May 13, 2008 at 2:49 p.m. (Suggest removal)
  Rest in Peace to all the victims. My sympathy and condolences to their families..I can't even imagine the pain and heartbreak.

  That's all that needs to be said right there.

  There's no room here to bash the Conservatives or to bash the Liberals. There is a spiritual way to help the suffering or the needy. You dig out your wallet and you give. But don't let your left hand see what your right hand doeth. In otherwords, just do what you can and then STFU about it. No need to brag about it, and no need to go begging for it.

  As far as China and the earthquake, 7.9 is a wicked huge earthquake and if one of these hit LA right now, it wouldn't be good. And something else, people around here would stop judging China's ability to overcome such a fate and start worrying about its own fate. Now there's Karma for you. Karma is what happens to those with no Faith, if you want to get religious about it.

  So there ya go. You've got humanities, religion, and politics covered in this one post right here.

  Happy hump day, dorks! x]

• May 14, 2008

  12:18 p.m.

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  davies writes:

  One coincidence in this for the Chinese government is that it certainly takes most of the attention away from the Tibet controversy. Now they can cruise into the summer Olympics on a wave of global empathy for the earthquake victims; heads of State don't have to sweat about whether they should attend the opening ceremonies, etc. Ironic in a way.