The masks kept the dust from the firefighters’ faces, but did nothing to conceal the reek of death. On a mound at the heart of the town’s middle school, they were frantically digging out bodies.
Sometimes they scooped at the debris with bare hands; sometimes, they summoned a winch to lift out large chunks of masonry. Army soldiers bore the bodies away. The arms of a young girl, face down on a stretcher, splayed awkwardly.
Slowly, painfully, the teenagers emerged: a second, third and fourth in an hour. From deep within the ruins, the faintest of moans spurred the workers on. ”Go! Go!” The briefest cheer went up. More than three days after his school collapsed around him, a young boy emerged, battered but alive, from his prison. Sheltering his face from the sun with a schoolbook, soldiers rushed the teenager to a nearby tent. Doctors attached an intravenous drip and cut away his clothes, washing the gashes on his leg with bottled water before daubing them with iodine.
But no one knew if the rescued boy would survive his journey down a mountainous road pitted with holes and strewn with boulders the size of cars. From there, the ambulance would have to race further, past hundreds of flattened homes, to the nearest hospital, tens of kilometres away.
At least 700 of his classmates were still buried, while 360 had been pulled out alive before him. An entire community has been wiped out in Beichuan, one of the mountainous areas now cut off. An estimated 8 000 people are still missing across the county in what officials have described as the most serious natural disaster since 1949.
Three more pupils had been rushed from the site that morning and another three people, maybe more, from the centre of the town, further up the road and still cut off by a rockslide. One, said a witness, had walked away once released by firefighters.
But bodies lay everywhere in the rubble, too many to count and too many to be removed. In one corner of what had been a room, six boys and girls lay crumpled. Piled against each other, their dust-coated skin was discolouring. A ponytailed teenager in a striped T-shirt had flung one arm above her head in a vain attempt to protect herself. Elsewhere, a girl slumped forward at her desk. She had not even left her chair when her world caved in.
The paper strewn across the rubble offered clues to where the classrooms once stood. In one spot, the fluttering pages of a textbook showed a world map. In another, mangled chairs had belonged to an English class. A neat hand had penned a note across the front of an exercise book: ”Me/You/Him/Her/Us/They” above the matching characters.
At the edge of the scene a young soldier pulled aside his mask and vomited quietly. Thousands of his comrades had hiked up to the town and were labouring around the school. Hundreds of volunteers were here too, risking their lives for the slim chance of saving others.
”Our home town has been destroyed, but this place is much more terrible. We knew this place might not be safe, but we had to try our best to help the farmers,” said a volunteer from Mianyang city. ”When we first arrived, the day after the earthquake, we could still hear people in the town. We looked down and a woman in her 30s was alive, but we couldn’t reach her.
”There was heavy rain and I think many people under the ground must have drowned.” His friend said that soldiers had rescued perhaps 100 in the first hours after their arrival on Tuesday, carrying the injured down across the blocked road on tables, chairs and anything else they could salvage.
”We found six people and saved no one,” he added. ”We saw them dying. We could do nothing. We had no equipment. About 10 soldiers in two hours can maybe save one person. Perhaps some people are still alive, but they can’t wait any longer.”
The two praised the dedication of troops, but feared that time had been wasted in the first crucial hours. ”Soldiers had no idea what to do. They needed a proper rescue plan,” one said.
More workers and equipment were still on their way to the town. But at the foot of the mountain road, angry women blocked a relief lorry, urging it to turn aside. Their relatives lay in rubble close by and so far no one had helped. They could not afford to spare pity for those trapped in Beichuan. – guardian.co.uk Â