In The Disaster Zone

Paramilitary troops clear a collapsed building. The red square at right is a wedding photo still hanging from an exposed wall

Here's our latest piece on the town of Dujiangyan, one of the cities hit by Monday's earthquake in Sichuan. My colleague Lin Yang and I visited there yesterday and returned again today. It's hard to pin down the feelings in the city. There was the sadness of families outside collapsed buildings, waiting for news of loved ones trapped inside. There is the shock of seeing corpses lined up along the sidewalk. There's the anger of families who lost their children in collapsed schools and wonder why so many public buildings collapsed. There was inspiration in the caravans of volunteers who drove out to help and donate food, so many that they had to be stopped on the highway from Chengdu to keep them from overrunning the disaster area.

Cars packed with bottled water and instant noodles mixed on the highway with the huge green military trucks bringing more troops to help with rescue efforts. Along the roadsides there are young soldiers slumped over, trying to get a minute of sleep before they return to moving debris by hand. There are also urban management officers who sit in their cars and appear to get all the rest they need. One man, the father of a boy who escaped from a collapsing school, said that the officers—who are something between police and meter maids—were reluctant to offer any help.

Dujiangyan is filled with collapsed apartment buildings, and many structures have suffered obvious damage. As a result much of the city sleeps out under tents. People are either too scared to go home, or have no home to return to. Despite all the destruction there are still some signs of life as usual. People laugh and play cards, happy perhaps that they've avoided the fate of so many others around here. I talked with one man in a food line who was waiting with a hundred or so others. “I look forward to life getting back to normal, to the city going back to work,” he said. It seems like it'll be a long time before that happens.