Posted on 05/14/2008 4:29:09 PM PDT by blam
China earthquake: Exodus begins from Sichuan
By Richard Spencer in Hanwang Town, Sichuan Province
Last Updated: 11:05PM BST 14/05/2008
Tens of thousands of people have poured down from the mountainsides of Sichuan searching for food and water as rescuers evacuated towns where more than 40,000 people are dead, buried or missing. Rescue teams are digging through rubble, trying to reach survivors of a powerful earthquake in China.
Helicopters began to airlift residents out of the villages of Wenchuan county at the epicentre of the earthquake which struck China on Monday, while others walked for hours into the valleys and plains to the south and east. The county is still cut off from land-based relief by landslides.
But the exodus might yet be heading into more danger, with emergency workers attempting to plug gaps in two major dams.
The Zipingpu dam, above the city of Dujiangyan with its population of 600,000, was said at one stage to be in an "extremely dangerous state" with cracks more than four inches wide appearing in its face, though the water resources ministry later said on its website that it was stable for the time being.
Tulong dam, further north on the Min river, was said by officials to be near collapse, something which would have a knock-on effect on a series of dams and power stations further downstream.
Almost 400 dams altogether were said to have been affected by Monday's earthquake – the wet and mountainous province is criss-crossed by some of China's biggest and fastest-flowing rivers.
While some dams, like Zipingpu, are modern, others were built when construction standards were lower.
All day long, the 100,000 troops now assigned to the rescue effort grappled with the wreckage of major cities, towns and villages across a wide area.
There were some successes, including the rescue of a three-year-old girl in Beichuan, one of the worst-affected towns, and an eight-months pregnant woman trapped under an apartment block in Dujiangyan.
But by the evening the official death toll stood at nearly 15,000, with another 25,000 reported buried and more unaccounted for.
In Wenchuan, a paramilitary officer told local television that a third of houses had been destroyed and 90 per cent damaged.
Meanwhile, the survivors were starting to look ever more desperately for supplies, walking for hours out of their mountain villages to seek help.
"There is nothing left of my village," said Fu Yuanming, who had walked for 10 hours from Village Number 3 of Qingping district near the epicentre to Hanwang town. "We need help. Our people have nothing to eat, they have nothing to drink."
He said a landslide had blocked the river above the village, turning into a reservoir that was about to burst.
Along all the roads in the region, makeshift camps have been set up. Residents of the towns lined up patiently as fire engines served out buckets of water; in the villages, locals ran out into the road to forcibly stop trucks and beg for supplies of noodles and biscuits.
"Someone had better set up relief coordination, or the people will resort to robbery," said one man in the village of Wudu.
More than 10,000 people were crowded into the sports stadium in the city of Mianyang, Sichuan's second biggest city and an important base for China's high-tec industry. Many had walked from Beichuan.
Ralph Johnson, a British teacher who lives in the city and runs a pub there, said that almost a million people were now spending their days on the streets. That included the city's 800,000 population, many of whom were like him unable to return to their damaged flats, and thousands more refugees.
He was also waiting to hear news of the mountain primary school for which his regulars have raised funds, and which feeds a secondary school known to have collapsed with up to 1,000 dead.
"We have not heard anything from the school," he said.
A British embassy rapid response unit began work in the provincial capital Chengdu to help coordinate the search for tourists trapped in the region. Nineteen members of a Kuoni tour party that were on their way to the Wolong giant panda reserve near Wenchuan when the earthquake hit were still unaccounted for last night.
There were unconfirmed reports that a group of 50 tourists had been located at the reserve, and 12 Americans who had been missing spoke to Worldwide Fund for Nature officials by satellite phone.
But Sir William Ehrman, the British ambassador, told The Daily Telegraph that there had still been no contact with the British group.
"We are extremely concerned," he said. "We are trying all we can to locate those who are unaccounted for."
Do you want to know how paranoid the Chinese government is? Remember the downing of the U.S. surveillance aircraft early in the Bush administration? Like many FReepers I was suggesting some very harsh "measures" at the time. I had a free version of Zone Alarm that scanned for port probes also. Within minutes I started getting a huge volume of port probes. Zone Alarm allowed you to trace them at that time. They were all coming from Asian servers. Normally I would get one or two a day from U.S. universities. I was getting one every few minutes after posting my "suggestions."Interesting. But how would they get your IP? That would be kind of freaky if they were sitting on your or FR's subnet with a packet sniffer.When you worry about what a retired carpenter in the Rocky Mountains is saying about your country halfway around the world you've got some real psychological problems.
Please answer the question. How many of the last 200 years has Taiwan been under the direct political control of Beijing?
200 years ago, the United States were a colony of Great Britain. We are not going to go back to being a part of the United Kingdom because of history from centuries ago.
Why should Taiwan go back under the boot heel of Beijing because of history from centuries ago?
Actually,it seems that many people are unconscioused about the history.They don not konw the real fact:TaiWan was a apart of China long long ago.
it’s really a good opportunity to communicate with everyone here on FR
i wanna to restate that i am not work for the chinese gov.
i have my post here just for the purpose of enhancing the exchange between china and usa
and i come here to thank everyone for caring the people in earthquake
and for the political problems about Taiwan and Tibet, i think we can get answer from history, not someone’s mouth...
Then, you might find that a rich businessman (from China or from abroad) needs your kidneys, liver or heart more than you do. On that day, after your DNA match, you will be taken out and shot like a cow or a pig, to have your organs “harvested.”
So you see, it is difficult to have an honest and free discussion, when one person lives under that threat from his government.....if he says the wrong words.
Thanks for that post about the Internet situation in China. I’m in Shanghai. If a Chinese is reading Free Republic, I doubt that they are merely trying to argumentative or defensive in their posts. They probably have a real interest in what is happening on these pages. I am trying to make personal contact with one such.
China Organ Harvesting Report, in 19 Languages
what’s this?
I haven’t read the whole thread- but that thought has been crossing my mind. This disaster is ongoing and will require enormous resources and mobilization of the PRC. Dams are giving way and I’m wondering what shape the nuclear facilities (in the region) are in...
How are they going to hold the Olympics in three short months?
Probably for about as many years as "Aztlan" has been under the direct political control of Mexico City.
Can you see the link posted above at #210? In a free country, you would be able to go to that website and read some articles about what is happening in China that your government doesn’t want you to see.
In a dictatorship, a tyranny, you will probably not be allowed to go to that website. And if you do somehow manage to go to that website, the Chinese secret police will probably put you down as a dissident.
And if that happens....you might be tossed into prison, and wind up having your organs “harvested” by your own government’s doctors, to put into a rich businessman in return for a large money payment.
Of course, if you don’t believe me, just go to that forbidden website and read the articles for yourself.
But if you can’t go to that website, it is because your own government does not trust you to know the truth.
Probably.
Let me know if you can open this independent website with China news.
http://chinaview.wordpress.com/
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2016206/posts?page=17
"I'm chinese,too.After several days here in only a few threads,I found it's difficult to speak freely here.Any good words about Chinese gov. would mark you as a spy or Pla or some "ChiCom propaganda"——a word I even dont know until I use the translation software.It's funny and boring.
What someone here want to hear is that we all hate the gov. and we are suffering in hell in china.Anything else would be regarded as lie.It's hard to communicate with such pertinacious bias.
Funny that it's very same as in some Chinese forum.If anyone of here can read Chinese,you can go to www.tianya.cn(which have more than 20,000,000 registered users and usually 200,000 online),or some other big forum. The reason why so many chinese come here is only because some thread with your link about the quake appeared on such forum.So it's not strange to have some curious ones here.I really see some threads posted by other country which also draw not only welcome but also suspicion.Just like here."
"you know what,most of us are like you while some of us are also rude and unkind.haha,I'm familiar with that in our forum ,so I dont really mind what I see here and I can understand it. In the forum I mentioned before and more others,you can find tons of threads complaining the Chinese gov. and dark side of society,all posted by common folks.We do have freedom of speech,unless you are too radical even to make chaos and hurt society safety."
And above all,I learn a new word "zotted" here in this thread.I take it's meaning is Banned,am I right?haha,Do you call this freedom of speech?I always think you can accept everything,like the one said"I do not agree with what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it". ^ ^
No, it's freedom of association. As in, we have no desire to associate with PLA/ChiCom propagandists.
I don't know enough about computers to tell you. I'm just a point-and-clicker. All I know is that within 30 - 40 minutes of posting some hyperbolic "glass parking lot" type challenges I was being port scanned like crazy and they traced back to Taiwan, Hong Kong and mainland China. What should/would I make of that?
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