Quake rescuers fight fatigue, seek signs of life
By John Ruwitch
BEICHUAN, China, May 17 (Reuters) - A billboard on the road into Beichuan shows a picturesque hill town with a river snaking past. What remains after Monday's earthquake is a horror scene.
Navy medic Han Zhihai, walking into the near-deserted town from a camp nearby after taking a lunch break, points to a huge boulder, one of many by the dirt-covered road that careened down the adjacent mountain during the giant tremor.
"Legs," he says.
Jutting from under the rock are two legs, feet pointing down, one still wearing a purple high heeled shoe.
Further into town, some 90 km (60 miles) northeast of the epicentre of the quake, streets are buckled and cracked and every building is ruined in one way or another.
Some crumbled into unrecognisable piles of wood, concrete and bricks. Others came clapping down, the floors finally resting stacked like pancakes with no space in between. Many more buildings dropped largely intact from the second floor up, crushing the ground floor and everything in it.
"That used to be a school," one of Han's teammates said, pointing towards a giant pile of boulders and dirt that slid down a mountain. The only thing left standing was a flagpole with the national flag still flying.
"At some of these places it will be impossible to extract bodies."
Five days after the 7.9 magnitude earthquake struck, Han, his team of six, and hundreds of other soldiers and rescue teams from around the country are fighting fatigue but still carefully searching for survivors in one of the hardest hit areas.
Beichuan is eerie and deserted except for the rescue crews and a handful of residents calling out for loved ones or digging for them. Groups of peasants walking from distant hill villages pass through the littered streets seeking help.
Han and his five weary colleagues have been administering first aid to live victims when they are drawn from the rubble.
"We've been working about 20 hours a day. I haven't washed my face, I haven't washed my feet, I haven't brushed my teeth in three days," Han said on Friday.
"This is really difficult," said Zhang Mingye, a member of the team from the main navy hospital in Beijing. "But we have to do it. We have orders to follow. It's starting to get hard to find live ones now."
RUNNING OUT OF TIME
Time was running out, but there are still some survivors. Sichuan vice governor Li Chengyun said there were more than 14,000 people buried in rubble in the whole province. Earlier on Friday, Han's team tended to two children pulled from the wreckage of a school.
By late afternoon, Xinhua news agency said 17 people had been rescued from the ruins of Beichuan.
Rescue squads in orange jumpsuits still picked through the remains of several buildings where calls for help have been heard. Sniffer dogs and electronic devices help locate the living among the rubble.
Han's team stopped before a broken building where a crew of rescuers from the eastern province of Jiangsu were working.
One shouts: "Do you have anyone living in there?"
"Yes. Two," replied a rescuer.
"How long before you'll have them out?"
"I don't know," was the reply.
Han's team decides to move on in search of others.
"Look around," said Zhang as he walked down an uneven concrete road with contorted buildings on each side, some leaning in, some leaning out, others half pulverised.
"You can imagine that this was a fairly well-off place before the earthquake. Now, I doubt 1 percent of its people have survived."
In a show of support for the relief effort, President Hu Jintao on Friday visited Beichuan, 90 km northeast of the quake's epicentre in Wenchuan.
"The challenge is still daunting, the task is still arduous and time is pressing," Xinhua quoted Hu as saying.
Past a giant crane, groups of rescuers worked buildings on both sides of the street while others, eyes red from exhaustion and dust, rested on the curb.
On one side, they were trying to work out how to extract a 21-year-old man from a building leaning dangerously forward.
"Both his legs are pinned down," said a doctor on the scene.
On the other side of the road, a crew talked to a trapped woman through the roof of what used to be a branch of the Agricultural Bank of China. The flat roof now slopes down on top of the flattened building.
Asked how long it would take to get her out, one rescuer said he did not know.
Another medical team stopped in front of the flattened building. "We were here yesterday," one of them said. "It will be very, very difficult to get that one out and save her."
They, too, moved on. (Editing by Nick Macfie and Tim Pearce)
BEICHUAN, China, May 17 (Reuters) - A billboard on the road into Beichuan shows a picturesque hill town with a river snaking past. What remains after Monday's earthquake is a horror scene.
Navy medic Han Zhihai, walking into the near-deserted town from a camp nearby after taking a lunch break, points to a huge boulder, one of many by the dirt-covered road that careened down the adjacent mountain during the giant tremor.
"Legs," he says.
Jutting from under the rock are two legs, feet pointing down, one still wearing a purple high heeled shoe.
Further into town, some 90 km (60 miles) northeast of the epicentre of the quake, streets are buckled and cracked and every building is ruined in one way or another.
Some crumbled into unrecognisable piles of wood, concrete and bricks. Others came clapping down, the floors finally resting stacked like pancakes with no space in between. Many more buildings dropped largely intact from the second floor up, crushing the ground floor and everything in it.
"That used to be a school," one of Han's teammates said, pointing towards a giant pile of boulders and dirt that slid down a mountain. The only thing left standing was a flagpole with the national flag still flying.
"At some of these places it will be impossible to extract bodies."
Five days after the 7.9 magnitude earthquake struck, Han, his team of six, and hundreds of other soldiers and rescue teams from around the country are fighting fatigue but still carefully searching for survivors in one of the hardest hit areas.
Beichuan is eerie and deserted except for the rescue crews and a handful of residents calling out for loved ones or digging for them. Groups of peasants walking from distant hill villages pass through the littered streets seeking help.
Han and his five weary colleagues have been administering first aid to live victims when they are drawn from the rubble.
"We've been working about 20 hours a day. I haven't washed my face, I haven't washed my feet, I haven't brushed my teeth in three days," Han said on Friday.
"This is really difficult," said Zhang Mingye, a member of the team from the main navy hospital in Beijing. "But we have to do it. We have orders to follow. It's starting to get hard to find live ones now."
RUNNING OUT OF TIME
Time was running out, but there are still some survivors. Sichuan vice governor Li Chengyun said there were more than 14,000 people buried in rubble in the whole province. Earlier on Friday, Han's team tended to two children pulled from the wreckage of a school.
By late afternoon, Xinhua news agency said 17 people had been rescued from the ruins of Beichuan.
Rescue squads in orange jumpsuits still picked through the remains of several buildings where calls for help have been heard. Sniffer dogs and electronic devices help locate the living among the rubble.
Han's team stopped before a broken building where a crew of rescuers from the eastern province of Jiangsu were working.
One shouts: "Do you have anyone living in there?"
"Yes. Two," replied a rescuer.
"How long before you'll have them out?"
"I don't know," was the reply.
Han's team decides to move on in search of others.
"Look around," said Zhang as he walked down an uneven concrete road with contorted buildings on each side, some leaning in, some leaning out, others half pulverised.
"You can imagine that this was a fairly well-off place before the earthquake. Now, I doubt 1 percent of its people have survived."
In a show of support for the relief effort, President Hu Jintao on Friday visited Beichuan, 90 km northeast of the quake's epicentre in Wenchuan.
"The challenge is still daunting, the task is still arduous and time is pressing," Xinhua quoted Hu as saying.
Past a giant crane, groups of rescuers worked buildings on both sides of the street while others, eyes red from exhaustion and dust, rested on the curb.
On one side, they were trying to work out how to extract a 21-year-old man from a building leaning dangerously forward.
"Both his legs are pinned down," said a doctor on the scene.
On the other side of the road, a crew talked to a trapped woman through the roof of what used to be a branch of the Agricultural Bank of China. The flat roof now slopes down on top of the flattened building.
Asked how long it would take to get her out, one rescuer said he did not know.
Another medical team stopped in front of the flattened building. "We were here yesterday," one of them said. "It will be very, very difficult to get that one out and save her."
They, too, moved on. (Editing by Nick Macfie and Tim Pearce)
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