waiting more than ten years for a new quake game

#Waiting more than ten years for a new quake game driver

A dozen pieces of A4 paper, stuck to the marble wall of its restaurant, bore the names of those who had escaped the shock. Wu grew quieter.Ĭhanghong, a major local employer, had taken charge of the middle school pupils, handling matters with corporate efficiency. On a street corner a giant screen flashed the latest rescue update. There were 60,000 refugees in Mianyang city - itself hit hard by the quake - they told him. A private car pulled over and the men inside urged Wu to get in. Taxis ferrying survivors there without charge were crammed. A young woman directed him to a centre seven kilometres away. Wu dashed from one group to another, seeking news of the middle school. Outside the main refugee camp, thousands of homeless families lay beneath tarpaulins or milled aimlessly on the grass.

#Waiting more than ten years for a new quake game driver

Each time the driver braked, the travellers lurched against each other and quacks of protest rose from ducks jammed in among cloth bundles.Īt Mianyang, the truck emptied quickly, its passengers keen to begin their search for loved ones, pausing only to help the others down. Other passengers, too tired or traumatised to speak, huddled in the corners, heads down. Two men leant over the side of the moving truck, sharing a cigarette as they watched the countryside speed past. 'I have buried so many dead bodies, I do not feel frightened any more,' he said. He shook his head and smiled when asked if he was afraid. 'We have no money to rebuild the house, but we can live in tents,' he said. But Wu insisted he would return once the road was unblocked. Some fear that the destruction wrought in Beichuan - and the sheer number of corpses in the rubble - will turn it into a ghost town. Despite the dangers of Beichuan, still at risk from aftershocks, landslides and flooding, many locals were only leaving the area to search for other family members elsewhere. 'You couldn't really call him talkative,' he said, showing his son's ID card. His mood could have been either optimism or denial: he must have known that hundreds of pupils - two-thirds of the roll - had died at that school.Īs the lorry rattled its way to Mianyang, Wu spoke about his son, 16-year-old Ming, a book-loving boy who hoped to become a lawyer. 'People there told me a lot of kids were taken straight to the Mianyang refugee camp, so I'm going there to see if I can find him,' he said, sounding resolute but calm. Wu had risen early that morning and walked for 10 hours over the mountain to find a lift, stopping first at the school. 'He was at Beichuan middle school and we can't get in touch with him.' Now I have time to look for my son,' he said. Even on the third day we got someone out alive. 'Those who were alive helped those who were trapped and injured. Like thousands across this vast swath of Sichuan, Wu and his neighbours had to help themselves. The heavy rains that followed prevented helicopter drops. Landslides on the road into town and between the centre and the main road, had blocked all hope of rescue. My wife and daughter were fine, but a lot of our neighbours died.' The telegraph poles fell and the land slipped into cracks. The sky was dark, the way it goes before rain. Our house collapsed and then the whole mountain. 'It was like a bomb exploding out of the ground,' he said. He was companionable and chatty, though he didn't want to give his real name we called him Mr Wu.Īt 2.28pm last Monday, Wu was tending his cornfield. 'The feeling of the earthquake was like this lorry,' said one of the farmers, as the vehicle jolted and shook its way across the countryside. Giant rocks littered the road and vehicles lay in ditches, thrown off the road by the force of the shock. Doorways poked out of the hillside where the houses around them had disintegrated. Clinging to the sides, they rattled down the steep road. A chicken poked its head through the hole in a sack and squawked irritably, but its owner had salvaged nothing else and had no intention of leaving it behind.Ī truck pulled up and the exhausted farmers hoisted themselves over the sides, cramming their meagre possessions in around them. Beads of sweat gathered on their foreheads as they waited for a ride. One woman had walked for three days with her baby and young daughter to reach this spot.

Nor did they register the unprecedented show of emotion from cabinet spokesman Guo Weimin, who had to stop to compose himself as he read from an updated casualty report which put the death toll so far at 28,881.įive days after the 7.9-magnitude quake hit the south-western province, destroying millions of homes and tens of thousands of lives, as their government's humane reaction to this disaster is changing perceptions of the communist regime around the world, these farmers thought only of those they loved and of survival.