When night falls the devastated town of Yingxiu, at the epicentre of last Monday’s earthquake, becomes a vision of the apocalypse.
At dusk the last army helicopter moves off through the haze and rescue workers start looking for firewood rather than bodies. The Min River darkens as it surges past banks of mangled buildings. Once the sickly sun slips behind the mountains, the light quickly fades. With no electricity, the only illuminations are army fires and a funeral pyre.
Residents choose their homes carefully, as far from the slopes as possible. You can feel why: the earth is still shaking — three aftershocks in less than an hour. The rain starts to fall, gently at first, but quickly turns into a mountain storm. Lightning flashes pierce tent covers, thunder rumbles along the valley and fears grow of landslides.
The sky and earth seem to be conspiring. At about 1am the thunder cracks above just as the ground shakes below. For those of a superstitious bent in this Wanchuan county community, the elemental fury confirms their worst fears.
”God is upset,” says Zhu Qunxue the next morning. The 80-year-old lives in a hovel that is almost the only building to remain habitable in a town of more than 7 000 people. ”Humans should not have used explosives to blast a hole through the mountains.”
She is referring to a highway tunnel that is now sealed by a landslide. It is not the only giant infrastructure project to have been humbled by the earthquake. The fragility of concrete is also apparent in the crumbling pillars of an overhead expressway. But Zhu also has a personal reason for fearing the curse of the gods. Her 13-year-old grandson was buried when the earthquake hit his primary school ”They still haven’t found his body,” she says. She spends almost every day at the school sitting there for hours with other relatives under a make-shift roof watching emergency workers attempting to find the lost children.
The wait for the bodies is what keeps many of the surviving parents from joining the exodus to safety. Some can no longer wait to conduct a proper burial. At night, one family burns the clothes of their missing loved ones.
Others stay in Yingxiu for returning relatives. Wu Qingying is badly bruised after her house collapsed on her, but even though she now lives in a tent she refuses to leave until her daughter returns. The 19-year-old was last seen on her way to a hospital in Wanchuan, another badly affected area. Her mother says she can manage until she returns. ”I find my own food. I haven’t asked the government for anything. The government has trouble of its own,” she says.
The final death toll has yet to be tallied. Soldiers have buried all the bodies they could find in graves in the hills. ”We put lots of them together,” says one, before adding apologetically. ”It couldn’t be helped. There were so many.” By one estimate only 2 500 residents survived out of a registered population of 6 000 locals, plus several thousand migrant workers. They are among national casualties expected to reach 50 000 dead and 300 000 injured.
The town is filled instead with soldiers. At least 4 000 troops and paramilitary police are camped on the stony plain next to the river, part of the 130 000 personnel deployed for the emergency. During the day, they sift through the rubble, looking for bodies. It is hard to lift morale in this harrowing task without seeming strange. One soldier picks up a red traditional jacket and pretends to try it: ”Hey, this looks good,” he jokes to his comrades. ”Don’t go crazy on us,” one of them replies.
Thousands of bodies are still trapped under the rubble. Sniffer dogs are sent in to find them but some buildings are too dangerous for rescuers to enter.
Army commanders are grimly realistic. ”This is the worst affected place,” says one senior officer, who declines to give his name. ”More than 140 hours have passed so there is very little chance of finding anyone alive.”
Support is trickling in from all over the country. ”I felt I just had to be here,” says Li Yuanhong, a doctor from the Chengdu Railway central hospital, who walked for more than 10 hours to bring medicine to Yingxiu. ”I just wish I could have come earlier to save people.”
Another group coming in are returning migrant workers who have hiked for days across the mountains to try to find their relatives.
One, Wang Fangbin (37) says he has not been home for eight years, but he got on the train from his workplace in Urumqi in western China as soon as he saw the news of the earthquake. The train ride took three days. He walked for two more to reach Yingxiu. ”I have to see if my old mother is OK,” says the construction worker. ”It looks as though everything was flattened.”
The priority for officials now is not to look for survivors, but to prevent the outbreak of disease. With one or two people still being found each day, officials dare not say this publicly. But the urgency to find survivors is understandably fading with each day that passes.
At what is left of the primary school, there is a moment when it seems as though everyone is observing a minute’s silence. No announcement is made, but suddenly everything stops: the emergency workers stand still, the bereaved stop crying and several soldiers hang their heads.
The only sound is the river rushing onwards. The only movement, a white butterfly flitting across the rubble.
In numbers
32 500 The official death toll from the earthquake. It is expected to rise
9 500 The number of people still believed to buried in Sichuan
220 000 The estimated number of people injured in the disaster
4,8-million The number of people who have been left homeless – guardian.co.uk Â