"In China, Skittish Pandas, Then Exploding Cliffs
CHENGDU, China — The birds suddenly disappeared from the sky. Something also was wrong with the pandas. They were strangely skittish. And then, within minutes, the isolated, verdant mountains above China’s most famous panda reserve exploded as if hit by a megaton bomb.
“The pandas were agitated and pacing,” recalled Pamela Capito, 60, a member of a 12-person American tour group visiting the reserve. “When the earthquake hit, we realized they had sensed it coming.”
If the pandas did sense approaching calamity, one reason is that the Wolong Nature Reserve sprawls over 772 square miles of rugged terrain directly beside the epicenter of Monday’s quake.
Foreign tourists evacuated to Chengdu by military helicopters described a horrifying disaster followed by a dangerous escape made possible by the kindness, and heroism, of panda keepers and other workers who helped save them, as well as 13 panda cubs.
“These keepers were risking their lives,” said Walter Weber, one of three American tourists interviewed Friday morning before they flew to Shanghai. “There was nothing safe about any of it.”
The fate of China’s pandas drew international concern from the moment Monday’s quake devastated the mountains of Sichuan Province. There are roughly 1,600 pandas living in the wild in China, most spread across 44 nature reserves in Sichuan. Long before the quake, researchers at Wolong had been placing hidden cameras throughout the reserve to monitor pandas in the wild. Now those scenes will be used to help assess the impact of the disaster. As yet, not a single panda is known to have died, a contrast to the human horror unfolding elsewhere in the mountains.
Lu Zhi, one of China’s leading panda experts, said researchers at the Sichuan reserves were combing the mountains in search of pandas while also trying to alleviate the greater human tragedy by delivering supplies to the remotest villages. At Wolong, she said, a senior security administrator died while taking part in rescue efforts.
Pandas are a major reason that Chengdu has become a tourist attraction and a departure point for excursions into the surrounding mountains. Taxis in the city are even affixed with panda decals. The group of 12 American tourists, traveling on a tour arranged by the World Wildlife Fund, had left Chengdu on the morning of the earthquake and driven to Wolong to spend the day.
“We were all really looking forward to it,” said Ms. Capito, who lives in Lakeport, Calif.
The same morning, a British group of 19 tourists also was visiting the reserve, as well as a French couple traveling with the husband’s 78-year-old mother. Ms. Capito and some of the other Americans had paid extra to play with the baby pandas that morning, but administrators asked if they would mind delaying their turn. A Chinese corporate group, a benefactor of the reserve, had arrived early and hoped to use the morning time slot.
The Chinese group took the earlier session and then left by bus around 2 p.m. along the long, winding road back to Chengdu. “That’s what is upsetting,” said Teri Kopp of Seattle, who sobbed quietly as she recounted that morning. “We don’t know what happened to that busload of people.”
The Americans were gathering for a lecture at the reserve’s panda breeding center when they noticed strange behavior by the animals. The birds that had been chirping in the bushes, or twirling in the skies overhead, were gone. There was almost no sound. The pandas seemed nervous. Then at 2:28, the earthquake hit.
“For me, what was terrifying was when the top of the cliffs started exploding,” Ms. Kopp said. “All the boulders started coming down. The staff at the reserve was wonderful. They were yelling at us to get under some structure.”
The steep mountains looming over the breeding center were collapsing in landslides as strong aftershocks rippled through the valley. “These rocks were just flying in the air,” Mr. Weber said. “A few of the rocks were the size of Volkswagens.”
The aftershocks finally halted, and the people at the reserve soon realized they were trapped. Boulders blocked the path leading to a bridge that linked the breeding center to the road to Wolong village. A new path was needed: The Frenchman, three Americans, a tour guide and the panda keepers created a route by climbing over cages, stepping carefully along the top of a wall high above a river and rigging a ladder up to the bridge. It was a precarious, rain-slicked solution.
One by one, everyone carefully moved forward. One of the Americans was a 79-year-old Californian traveling with a friend. “It was very scary,” Ms. Capito said. When the last person had made it to the bridge and out to the road, the staff raced back for the baby pandas. They carried the cubs tucked under their arms as they slowly edged forward above the river and then up the ladder.
All 13 cubs were saved. They were put inside a small ticket booth, a home that kept them from escaping, if not happy. “You could hear them,” Ms. Capito said. “They were just tearing the place apart. And when they let them out, they would just romp and play. Not one got killed. I couldn’t believe it.”
In a few hours, a path had been cleared along the road so that everyone could be taken to Wolong village. The hotel there was badly damaged, so the Americans slept in one tour bus and the British in another. “Everybody was great,” Ms. Kopp said. “The Brits were great. The British women would clean the bathrooms every day. They did their laundry in a stream and hung it on trees.”
Food was limited. Hotel workers provided two daily bowls of watery rice soup for the tourists, hotel staff and others. A few men navigated the damaged road and bought rice cakes and dried plums at a small store. Everyone else emptied out backpacks of raisins and other snacks.
“We got a rice cake for breakfast, a few raisins and a few nuts,” Ms. Capito recalled. Eventually, hotel workers had cleared debris out of the kitchen and tiny chunks of pork sausage began to appear in the bowls of rice soup.
The first sign of help came Tuesday. A military helicopter dropped a food shipment but aimed poorly and most of the supplies were destroyed. Hours later, a helicopter returned to collect the injured. “A soldier ran out with a very limp child in his arms,” Ms. Capito said.
The rains cleared on Wednesday but the aftershocks continued. The shaking would set off more landslides as everyone watched and worried.
Then, on Thursday morning, two helicopters returned. This time they were collecting the foreigners. “Nobody had a clue we were getting out,” Ms. Capito said. They had 10 minutes to gather their belongs and jump in.
Mr. Weber recalled the enormous damage he saw as the helicopters roared out of the mountains toward Chengdu. Every mountainside was scarred with landslide. The road leading into Wolong was destroyed and littered with wrecked cars — and also people slowly making their way out.
“We could see people walking on the road below,” he recalled. “But they were trapped between landslides.”
Ms. Capito remembered a mix of emotions when the helicopters roared away from Wolong: excitement over getting out and guilt and sadness over those left behind. Her husband had died three years ago and she knew the pain of loss.
“I knew I was going to be able to leave and go home to my comfortable house and to food,” she said. “I looked back and saw hundreds of villagers. I was just sobbing. I couldn’t believe I was so fortunate.
“And those poor people were being left behind and they had lost their families and their homes.”
I guess that was a "feel-good" story from the Times about the quake, huh, readers?
Here is what the Globe picked up from mother Times today:
CHENGDU, China - Thousands of earthquake survivors fled tent camps and villages across the ravaged landscape of southwestern China yesterday after the government warned that several lakes and rivers were getting dangerously close to overflowing because landslides have blocked water flow.
The new warnings were issued as government officials said that more than 3 million homes had been completely destroyed by Monday's earthquake and that more than 12 million had been damaged.
The government also increased its estimate of the death toll once again, to nearly 29,000. The humanitarian crisis resulting from the quake is the largest China has faced in decades.... Early today, a tremor with a magnitude of 6.0 struck northern Sichuan, one of the largest quakes since last Monday. Other tremors over the past several days have caused new landslides....
This can't be going over good with the Chinese people and their religious views on harmony.
Something is wrong when the earth is buckling so, no?
Landslides continue to pose one of the greatest threats in the rugged mountainous terrain of Sichuan. Daily aftershocks and tremors, at least 168 significant ones since Monday, set off new slides, further damaging settlements and blocking roads. There are at least 13 rivers and lakes dammed up by the quake....
Specialists outside China say that many of the threatened dams and reservoirs were built along the well-recognized Longmen Shan fault and that the dams might have sustained damage that could cause them to fail weeks after the big quake.
Government officials said yesterday that the death toll had risen to 28,881. Earlier in the week, they said the toll could rise as high as 50,000.
President Hu Jintao has urged rescuers to continue searching for survivors. Some were pulled out yesterday, but medical specialists say the chances of people living in rubble decrease significantly after the first 72 hours...."
This is an absolute disaster, readers.
This really does sour any Olympic Games.
