So quiet you could hear a HAARP.
Chinese have before.
"Earthquake in western China kills 617; Rescue efforts hampered by remote location" by Anita Chang, Associated Press | April 15, 2010
A strong earthquake injured more than 10,000 in the Tibetan region of China yesterday. A man stood in the rubble of a building in Jiegu township, Yushu County. (Xinhua News Agency via Associated Press)
Words just don't cut it.
XINING, China — Rescuers combed through the rubble of collapsed buildings for survivors today, more than a day after strong earthquakes shook a mountainous Tibetan region of China, killing more than 600 people and injuring thousands.
The series of quakes flattened buildings across remote western Yushu County and sent survivors, many bleeding from their wounds, flooding into the streets of Jiegu township. State television showed block after devastated block of toppled mud and wood homes. Local officials said 85 percent of the buildings had been destroyed.
Residents and troops garrisoned in the town used shovels and their hands to pull survivors and bodies from the rubble yesterday. Several schools collapsed, with the state news agency saying at least 56 students died. State broadcaster CCTV showed footage of rescuers working at night, picking through the rubble aided by torchlights fixed to their safety helmets. A group of workers found a girl trapped for more than 12 hours under a heap of debris.
“I can’t feel my arm,’’ said the girl, who was curled up with her back to the workers. The workers talked to her and fed her water as others searched for pieces of wood to prop up the rubble that had trapped her. As rescuers gingerly pulled her out and carried her to a stretcher, she could be heard saying: “I’m sorry for the trouble. Thank you, I will never forget this.’’
Crews set up emergency generators to restore operations at Yushu’s airport, and by late afternoon the first of six flights landed carrying rescue workers and equipment. But the road to town was blocked by a landslide, hampering the rescue as temperatures dropped below freezing. The death toll had risen to 617 by this morning, with more than 9,000 injured, including 970 seriously, and around 300 still missing. The Ministry of Civil Affairs said about 15,000 houses had collapsed and 100,000 people need to be relocated.
Many survivors spent the night in the cold outdoors, wrapping themselves in thick cotton blankets and lying on thin pads on the ground with cardboard boxes serving as pillows. Others spent the night in quake-damaged cars, covering exposed areas with sheets of plastic, CCTV footage showed. Xinhua said temperatures in the area can fall below freezing at night.
The airport in Xining, the nearest big city (530 miles away), was filled in the predawn hours today with Chinese troops in camouflage, firefighters, and rescue teams leading dozens of sniffer dogs. They were whisked onto buses for the drive to the quake zone, which takes 12 hours under the best of conditions. Yang Xuesong, a rescuer from Shandong Province in eastern China, said his biggest concern was the altitude. “This is the highlands. I don’t know if the search dogs can get used to it,’’ he said.
While China’s military is well practiced in responding to disasters, the remote location posed logistical difficulties. The area sits at around 13,000 feet and is poor. Most people live in Jiegu, with the remaining, mostly herders, scattered across the broad valleys. The small airport has no refueling supplies, so relief flights were carrying extra jet fuel, reducing their capacity for hauling supplies, state media reported.
It occurs to me that now China's military will be busy with the relief effort -- and thus will have less resources to aid Iran after the Usraeli attack.
“The situation here is difficult. Most of the buildings have collapsed. A lot of people are seriously injured,’’ said Pu Wu, a director of the Jinba Project, which provides health care training for Tibetan communities. “We are scared. We are all camping outside and waiting for more tents to come.’’
The local quake relief headquarters put the death toll at 589 and the injured at 10,000 by early this morning, according to the Xinhua news agency. Wu Yong, commander of the army garrison, said the deaths “may rise further as lots of houses collapsed.’’ Hospitals were overwhelmed, and rescue teams were slowed by damaged roads, strong winds, and frequent aftershocks.
President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao urged “all-out efforts’’ to rescue survivors and dispatched a vice premier to supervise the effort. The government allocated $30 million for relief, and mobilized more than 5,000 soldiers, medical workers, and other rescuers, joining 700 troops already on the ground. The initial quake, measured at magnitude 6.9 by the US Geological Survey and 7.1 by the China Earthquake Networks Center, hit Yushu at 7:49 a.m. It was followed by a series of aftershocks.
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Chinese doing the best they can:
"Supply shortages, sickness hinder quake relief in China" by Anita Chang, Associated Press | April 16, 2010
Rescuers, including Buddhist monks, carried an earthquake victim wrapped in a blanket in western China’s Qinghai Province yesterday. China poured rescue crews and equipment into a mountainous Tibetan region after strong quakes killed hundreds of people and injured thousands. (Associated Press)
The photographs halt ones tongue.
JIEGU, China — Earthquake survivors shivered through a second night outdoors in a remote Tibetan corner of western China, with rescuers fighting altitude sickness and dealing with a lack of supplies. The death toll rose to 760.
People with broken limbs cried in pain; medical teams could offer little more than injections. A doctor at the Qinghai provincial hospital, where the severely injured were being flown, said she had no idea how many were being treated because there was no time to count.
Stunned survivors wandered the dusty streets of Jiegu, where relief workers estimated 70 to 90 percent of the low-slung town of wood-and-mud housing had collapsed. Hundreds gathered to sleep in a plaza around a 50-foot statue of the mythical Tibetan King Gesar, wrapped in blankets taken from homes shattered by Wednesday morning’s quakes.
“There’s nothing to eat. We’ve just been drinking water,’’ said Zhaxi Zuoma, a 32-year-old camped with thousands of others on a rocky field. They asked a reporter to bring food the next day. The official Xinhua News Agency said 760 people had died, 243 people were missing, and 11,477 were injured, 1,174 of them severely. The worst of the quakes measured magnitude 6.9 by the US Geological Survey and 7.1 by China’s earthquake administration.
Rescue vehicles snaked along in a 12-hour drive from the provincial capital into the mountainous region, which trembled with aftershocks. The altitude averages 13,000 feet, leaving some rescuers breathless and ill. Even sniffer dogs were affected. To reinforce official concern for a Tibetan area that saw anti-government protests two years ago, Premier Wen Jiabao arrived to meet survivors. President Hu Jintao, in Brazil after visiting Washington, canceled scheduled stops in Venezuela and Peru.
“In recent years, the Tibetan areas have become more sensitive, and we can’t rule out the possibility that the government could use the earthquake to boost its relationship with Tibetans,’’ said Zhang Boshu, who has written about Tibet from his post with the philosophy institute at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
Is he saying what I think he is saying?
More than 10,000 soldiers, police, firefighters, and medical workers were already in Yushu as of yesterday, Zou Ming, disaster relief director with the Ministry of Civil Affairs, told reporters in Beijing.
All of which are now unavailable to help Iran.
The crush of relief efforts left the town’s roads jammed. “I’m now stuck in my car, unable to move at all. Trucks and cars are all over,’’ said Ren Yu, general manager of Yushu Hotel.
Officials said they welcomed offers of help from other countries and organizations, but they indicated they did not need foreign rescue teams and warned volunteers against going to the region because of limited access and resources.
But people still arrived from neighboring areas to look for the dead. Just after dusk, about 20 Buddhist monks and their friends sat by a pile of smoldering rubble where the Jieji temple used to be. Next to them lay the body of a middle-aged monk, covered in a blanket. Four other bodies were in a nearby car.
“We’ve come to bring their bodies home,’’ said Silang Pingcuo, who came with the others by motorcycle from neighboring Tibet. Officials said food, clothing, quilts, and tents were needed.
But delivering supplies is slow-going because there is but one main road from the provincial capital, and the airport is small and overworked. Xinhua reported about 550 injured people would be flown to larger cities for treatment.
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Turns out the Chinese are doing a pretty good job, all things considered:
“Chinese authorities are doing well.’’
And working with Tibetans, can you believe it?
"Adversaries unite in China quake search; Government workers, monks look for survivors" by Anita Chang, Associated Press | April 17, 2010
Rubble from a building destroyed in Wednesday’s earthquake crushed a vehicle in Yushu County in the Qinghai Province in northwest China. Relief efforts have been slowed by heavy traffic on the single main road from the Qinghai provincial capital. (AFP/Getty Images)
Stunning sights.
JIEGU, China — Tibetan monks in crimson robes dug through earthquake rubble alongside government rescue workers yesterday, a startling image for a Chinese region long strained by suspicion and unrest.
The central government has poured in troops and equipment to this remote western region, but it is the influential Buddhist monks residents trust with their lives — and with their dead.
As the death toll climbed to at least 1,144, there was tension and some distrust over the government relief effort, with survivors scuffling over limited aid. “They have a relaxed attitude,’’ said Genqiu, a 22-year-old monk at the Jiegu monastery, of the government-sent rescue workers. “If someone’s taking their photo, then they might dig once or twice.’’
Since Wednesday’s quakes, government relief efforts have been slowed by heavy traffic on the single main road from the Qinghai provincial capital, 12 hours away. Yesterday, heavy equipment finally arrived. “The disaster you suffered is our disaster. Your suffering is our suffering,’’ Premier Wen Jiabao said in remarks broadcast repeatedly on state television.
Though the government was reaching out, many residents turned to the monks and their traditions rather than to a central authority dominated by the majority Han Chinese. The groups are divided by language — the government has had to mobilize hundreds of Tibetan speakers to communicate with victims — as well as culture and religion. Cultural differences might have contributed to yesterday’s sharp rise in the death toll. In a telephone call with the Associated Press yesterday, rescue officials seemed surprised to hear that hundreds of bodies were at the Jiegu monastery, taken there by Buddhist families. The new official death toll was announced hours later.
It wasn’t clear whether tensions over the relief effort were driven by longtime suspicions of the government or by the stress of living outside for three days in the freezing air and digging for loved ones with bare hands. Many buildings in the town collapsed in the quakes; countless others are unsafe. Residents of the largely Tibetan town pointed out repeatedly that after the series of earthquakes Wednesday, the monks were the first to come to their aid — pulling people from the rubble and distributing their own limited supplies.
Tibetans traditionally perform sky burials, which involve chopping a body into pieces and leaving it on a platform to be devoured by vultures. But Genqiu, who like many Tibetans goes by one name, said that would be impossible now. “The vultures can’t eat them all,’’ he said at Jiegu monastery, where bodies were carefully wrapped in colorful blankets and piled three or four deep on a platform.
Isn't that a little barbaric for the non-violent Tibetans?
More than 200 monks chanted in the late-afternoon sun in preparation for a mass cremation on a nearby mountaintop today. In two blue government tents stamped “disaster relief,’’ hundreds of candles burned on a makeshift altar. One monk estimated that 1,000 bodies were brought to a hillside clearing in the shadow of the monastery. Gerlai Tenzing said a precise count was difficult because bodies continued to arrive and families had taken some away.
Yesterday, some survivors competed for the limited aid. A line of police held back anxious sunburned residents as aid workers unloaded packets of noodles, tents, and other supplies.
“I saw trucks almost attacked by local people because of the lack of food and shelter,’’ said Pierre Deve, program director at a community development organization, the Snowland Service Group. “It started yesterday, but you still see some things like this today. It’s getting better. Chinese authorities are doing well.’’
Still, he said his aid group was relocating outside town in case things got worse.
A few people were still being found alive. China Central Television reported that a 13-year-old girl was pulled from a toppled two-story hotel after a sniffer dog alerted rescuers. And the state news agency Xinhua said a 43-year-old woman was rescued after being trapped for 50 hours with no food or water.
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"Swarm of quakes shakes San Diego area" by ASSOCIATED PRESS | April 12, 2010
SAN DIEGO — A cluster of moderate earthquakes near the US-Mexico border continued to rattle southern San Diego County one week after a magnitude-7.2 quake slammed the area....
Scientists say the increased seismic activity is normal following the magnitude-7.2 earthquake April 4. Officials say the Easter quake killed two people and caused an estimated $100 million in damage in California alone. That temblor was the third strong quake to roil the Americas this year, after a magnitude-7 quake in Haiti killed 300,000 people and a magnitude-8.8 temblor in Chile killed 450.
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If they're a-leapin', I'm a-leavin'!
Also see: Obama Drilling For Martial Law Excuse
Someone once said the great earthquake shall be in the month of May, and given the smoke signals someone is sending lately.... beware, America!!
