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Relief Work Is Blunted In Remote Regions In China
China has mobilized one of the largest relief operations in its modern history, to aid victims of Monday's epic earthquake. But as a trek into one of the worst hit areas shows, the effort is falling short for many victims.
In the town of Beichuan, about two kilometers from the nearest functioning road, rescuers dug frantically through the rubble of a wrecked middle school. At other schools in the area, they were able to pull out survivors. Beichuan sits in the heart of a county with the same name that has accounted for an estimated 5,000 deaths -- roughly a third of the nearly 15,000 deaths officially reported so far.
Further into town, amid a tangle of toppled buildings and giant boulders from the surrounding mountains, there is an eerie silence penetrated by the cries of trapped survivors who aren't being reached.
One man dangles upside down over a hole near a battered building, his left leg pinned under a car-size boulder above. Rescue workers say they know he is there but say there are too many other victims to deal with and nothing they can do without heavier equipment.
'I feel like I'm already dead,' he says.
The magnitude-7.9 earthquake that rocked southwestern China's Sichuan province Monday afternoon dealt rescuers an especially cruel challenge, because much of its damage was done in remote, mountainous areas that are hard to reach.
China's government mobilized quickly in the hours after the quake, the country's worst natural disaster in more than 30 years. And by all accounts, the relief effort has been enormous -- including the largest airlift, the official Xinhua news agency says, in the history of the two-million-member People's Liberation Army, which is running the campaign. Nearly 100,000 military personnel have been deployed to the disaster zone. Amid inclement weather and a series of aftershocks that has complicated relief efforts, soldiers have in some cases parachuted into areas too isolated to be reached in other ways.
Yet in locations across the disaster zone, the relief work has also at times appeared disorganized or of limited effectiveness. Even some accessible areas were still waiting for relief workers or essential equipment more than two days after the quake struck. Homeless victims have had to sleep uncovered in the rain for lack of tents. Bottled water and gasoline are already running out in places. Poor sanitation in refugee centers threatens to exacerbate the misery by causing illness or disease.
Other equally large challenges loom. Officials say they haven't yet made plans for what to do with the homeless, who may number in the hundreds of thousands.
'It's right to consider rebuilding up front, but we don't have specific plans yet,' said Wang Zhenyao, director of the Disaster Relief Division at the Ministry of Civil Affairs. He says the priority is still rescuing survivors.
The official death toll of the quake had risen to 14,463 as of late Wednesday afternoon in China, Xinhua reported. More than 14,000 were listed as missing, nearly 26,000 buried in debris, and 64,746 were injured, many of them severely.
The number of dead seems almost certain to rise. On Wednesday, reporters from Xinhua reached Wenchuan County, the site of the quake's epicenter, for the first time. Bad weather and landslides had kept relief workers from reaching the town for more than 24 hours after the quake. The Xinhua reporters found the situation 'worse than expected.' In one town, Yingxiu, local officials said that only 2,300 of the 10,000 residents appear to have survived.
Among the dangers that threatened to further aggravate the plight of survivors in the quake area was damage from to some of the region's many dams. Of particular concern was the Zipingpu dam, which sits upriver from the battered tourist town of Dujiangyan, and which was cracked by the quake. An official at the Ministry of Water Resources said an expert team sent to examine Zipingpu has reported so far that the dam's structure is stable and safe. But the official said the inspection work is continuing.
Financial donations and offers of assistance poured in from foreign countries and international relief groups. On Wednesday, the first large shipment of foreign aid -- 24 tons of tents and other materials from Russia -- arrived in Chengdu, the Sichuanese provincial capital about 90 kilometers from the epicenter.
China's government has expressed gratitude for the offers of assistance, but so far hasn't let foreign emergency-response teams participate in rescue efforts, despite signs that medical personnel and other resources are becoming strained.
That has proven frustrating for some foreign aid workers eager to help while their expertise could still save lives.
'We wonder now if our rescue dogs will ever have an opportunity to help, because chance of survival of people buried under debris is said to drop after 72 hours,' said Yumi Kurata, a spokeswoman for the Japan Rescue Association. Her group, formed after Japan's deadly Kobe earthquake in 1995, has offered to dispatch its dogs and experts, but the offer was rejected by Chinese authorities who said the quake-affected area remains too hard to access.
Japan learned the hard way that turning down expertise can prove painful during its Kobe quake, which killed more than 6,400 people. In the immediate aftermath of that quake, foreign rescue dogs were quarantined and medical-licensing bureaucracy kept U.S. doctors from treating patients for three days after their arrival -- actions that were criticized later.
Myanmar's military government, meanwhile, has come under intense criticism for its refusal of foreign aid after this month's devastating cyclone.
China has said conditions in the disaster zone make it impractical for foreign aid teams to come at this point.
'Now even our military troops are not able to get there,' says Mr. Wang, the Disaster Relief Department director. He said authorities are still discussing overseas offers.
Some foreign experts say the Chinese decision is understandable. Language and cultural factors can make it difficult to accommodate foreigners in the chaos of a relief effort. In the Kobe quake, The Association of Medical Doctors of Asia lost valuable time arranging interpreters, transportation and accommodations for a team of French doctors who came to assist, says Shigeru Suganami, the Japan-based organization's chief. His organization is offering assistance to China now, but 'I really understand why China says they don't need help from overseas,' he says.
Kate Redman, a spokeswoman in London for Save the Children, a nonprofit aid organization, praised China's efforts so far, saying no international group could have responded so quickly.
'In this particular case, this is definitely the right way to go about it,' she says of the government's approach.
A small number of foreign organizations are participating, but are less involved in the emergency response work. Two representatives of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies accompanied Chinese aid workers to Sichuan this week, and Beijing has accepted about $230,000 in emergency funding from the umbrella organization to replenish its own existing stockpiles of emergency relief materials.
The limitations of the official response were evident Wednesday night in Pengzhou, a town 60 kilometers from the epicenter, as waves of military trucks arrived carrying thousands of people from their ruined homes in the nearby mountains. Deposited in the dusty town center, they waited for periodic distributions of food, with no instructions about what to do next. Some were starting to get sick, and unable to get medicine because they had no money.
Storefronts in Pengzhou are now labeled with handwritten lists of villages on them, so people know how to find their neighbors.
Deng Jun, 24 years old, helped guide more than 400 people from his village to the nearest town in order to get rescued. The group had to spend the night outside in the rain and Mr. Deng says his 9-month old baby is now sick.
'His nose is running and he's been crying for days. We didn't have anything to feed him since Monday,' Mr. Deng says. 'I took him to the hospital but they turned us away because I don't have my identification card.' Mr. Deng says he tried to buy medicine in the pharmacy, but couldn't afford it. The price had been raised by a third.
Another several hundred people from Mr. Deng's village are still there, he says, because they were injured or too old to walk out with him.
Some distraught victims were angry at what they said was an inadequate response.
'This government is a real shame,' said Yang Gang, who had traveled hundreds of kilometers from Inner Mongolia, where he works, to his home in Beichuan to search for his son. Dressed in army surplus clothes and carrying a woven basket packed with supplies, he pored through the rubble of his son's school, unsuccessfully. 'Where are the officials? They all ran away? Who was there to help us? What could we do -- there were only a few of us with no tools.'
Helping him was a man who had come home to look for his wife. He wore a bicycle helmet for protection from the falling rock. 'I was there yesterday morning at five. I rode my motorcycle until I couldn't buy anymore gas. Then I got a bicycle,' he says. But 'My wife is gone.'
The devastation in Beichuan is overwhelming. Huge parts of the town, nestled in a valley, were buried under the collapsing mountains around it. The rubble-strewn streets are littered with bodies, some pinned under rocks, other twisted in cars that crushed like soda cans. Some corpses line the side of the road, with blankets thrown over them. One women sits on a giant pile of rubble, sobbing and saying the same name again and again.
Many rescuers were hard at work, particularly around the collapsed school. Surviving children pulled from the rubble were carried in the arms of rescuers out of the town and up a muddy slope to safety.
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But handfuls of other rescue workers wander around aimlessly, unable to help without heavy equipment needed to move boulders and chunks of ruined construction. On the road leading in, a giant logistical bottleneck has kept hundreds of trucks and perhaps thousands of rescuers from reaching the ruined town.
Beichuan's plight has drawn attention around China and has attracted volunteers.
'There are dozens of people still in there,' says one man, from Chengdu, pointing to a bus that was shattered by falling rocks as it turned out of the long-distance bus station. 'They say it's too hard to save people here,' he says. But he doesn't plan to leave.
Shai Oster / James T. Areddy
