Witness to Disaster

Tom Shanahan is the television presenter for the CCTV-9 program Rediscovering China. Below is his first-hand account of reporting on the scene about the aftermath of last month’s tragic Sichuan earthquake. The first part of the program airs today on CCTV-9 at 1:30pm and 9:30pm, and you can catch the second installment next Monday, June 9, at 5:30am, 1:30pm and 9:30pm.

On Wednesday May 14th we were to travel to Guangxi province for a shoot, however our plane was delayed because it was being used to transport doctors from Beijing to Wenchuan. This was my first indication of just how bad the situation was.

Like most people, we felt the tremor in our office in Beijing, and because the initial shock brought down communications, we initially thought that only 900 students in one school had been buried.

While in Beijing I discussed with the director that we should go to Wenchuan to cover the earthquake. She didn’t have the authority to make this decision so I sent my producer several text messages and calls stressing the importance of this story. He agreed, however he had to contact his supervisor. I knew there would be a lot of red tape as this was a natural disaster and foreigners had never been allowed to cover natural disasters in China before.

The next day in Nanning, the producer told me his request had been approved by the senior officials at CCTV. We were to change course immediately and head for Sichuan.

Due to the lack of transportation, it was extremely difficult for us to get to Chengdu, but we eventually made it and were filming our first story on the 15th of May.

After negotiating through several army and police roadblocks, the first earthquake-affected area we visited was a school in Dujiangyan where over 280 students and teachers had lost their lives. Very sadly, the school had completely collapsed on the students during class, and many of the adjacent buildings were left standing. I was later to discover that this was a tragic trend, and many other schools had collapsed in the Wenchuan area.

Outside the school was a large group of locals standing around. The atmosphere was eerily quiet until a woman came out of nowhere hysterically screaming and crying. She was blaming the headmaster for not doing enough to save the children, and he just stood there not saying anything.

The woman cried and screamed for over thirty minutes. I interviewed her and she said that when the earthquake hit, she realized her child was still in the school and ran over to the building, but the gate was blocked. She was told it was too dangerous to go in. Within several minutes the entire building had collapsed with her daughter still inside.

The next day on Friday the 16th, we visited Beichuan. Nothing could have prepared me for what I saw there. After a very long drive up a narrow mountain road and negotiating our way past several army roadblocks, we eventually made it to the entrance of the town. The area had only just been made accessible after a rash of mudslides, making rescue operations over the first three crucial days very difficult.

By the time I arrived most of the survivors had been pulled out. Our team was lucky enough to be the only media at the scene of one rescued man (which is featured in episode one of our program).

A journalist we interviewed who arrived in Beichuan on the 13th said at that time it was still possible to hear the voices of the survivors buried calling for help. He painted a very haunting picture of what it was like in the first 48 hours. There were bodies everywhere and 30 percent of the town residents were either trapped in buildings or killed. Most of these people died either by being buried alive or caught in the devastating landslides that destroyed the town. The bodies that I saw pulled out were twisted into the most grotesque positions and many of their faces were no longer even recognizable as human.

In those first 48 hours, due to the limited number of immediately available resources, the workers at the scene they had to decide who to rescue and who to let die based on their condition and whether or not they were going to die regardless of medical help.

The town, which had a population of 30,000, lay at the bottom of two mountains. By the time we arrived, the earthquake had already claimed about 30 percent of the population and over 80 percent of the town lay in ruins. The buildings that weren’t destroyed by the aftershocks were flattened by huge boulders – some larger than trucks – and those who managed to escape their buildings were buried by landslides.

I saw cars that looked like they had been in steel compressors and bodies crushed beyond belief. But most traumatic of all, I saw people hysterically crying. Looking for their family members in the rubble, or standing over the recently discovered body of their loved ones, these people had lost everything and were often the sole surviving member of their families. They had to go through this hell alone.

We had to do an emergency evacuation of Beichuan because we were told the adjacent dam was going to break causing a lethal flood into the valley, and because of daily aftershocks it was too dangerous to return.

So we spent the remaining time in Wenchuan County with the survivors, the refugees and the children. We also visited some hospitals where some 200,000 injured were (and still are) being treated. At the local sports stadium, which housed some 3,000 refugees, I spoke with some people who had lost everything. But somehow they could still come up to me with a smile on their face, curious to see a foreigner, share their story and have their photo taken with me. One woman I visited in the refugee campsite of tents even apologized to me for the dismal conditions. People offered me their own rations of water and food – it was simply amazing how the spirit of these people had not been crushed despite all the loss they had suffered.

Because the threat of another major earthquake was continuously on our minds (the entire city of Chengdu had literally taken to sleeping on the streets) and because the threat of disease spreading was now very serious, we had to return to Beijing on the 22nd. We will be planning a return trip sometime later, perhaps after six months to a year, to see how the town and lives of the survivors are being rebuilt.