China earthquake: Survivors huddle in the hills, no longer trusting their town

Driven from their shattered homes the people of badly hit Jiegu are living outdoors, hungry, fearful of more tremors and desperate for better rescue gear than their bare hands and shovels
china earthquake yushu qinghai
A nine-month-old child injured in the earthquake in Yushu, Qinghai. Photograph: Stringer Shanghai/REUTERS

When a faint tremor briefly disturbed Sanden Dolma's sleep early on Tuesday morning she did what most inhabitants across the town of Jiegu did: murmured a prayer, rolled over, and went back to sleep. But a couple of hours later, her bed began to shake again.

This time, it did not stop. She stumbled to her door, but found she could not walk out; she had to crawl as the ground swayed beneath her. From her hands and knees, she looked up to see a world thick with dust.

The town, sited deep in China's north-west Qinghai province, is paying dearly for its moment of trust. An estimated 600 lie dead, 8,000 are injured and many more are homeless after a 6.9  magnitude quake struck shortly after that first warning tremor.

Located in the remote Yushu county, a mountainous landscape sparsely dotted with tiny settlements, the overwhelmingly Tibetan town is the biggest for well over 60 miles. Like much of Qinghai it is impoverished compared with central and eastern China, but in recent years an increasing number of modern constructions, alongside the traditional wood and brick homes, have been erected here.

As Sanden Dolma groped her way across the pavement she squinted up to see the upper storey of her neighbours' home come crashing down. Eight-year-old Bema and five-year-old Banjul somehow leapt to safety from the staircase as their house collapsed around them. Their father, Ogin Dhorje, suffered serious head injuries, their mother, Yang Xin, was buried in the rubble.

"Last night we all slept up in the hills without clothes and food – countless people. But I don't know where the boys are. They have no mother now and no one is sure where their father is," said Sanden Dolma. She feared they might not survive another night in the open with no one to care for them.

Black smoke is still pouring from the huge mound of rubble to the other side of her home. Once a three-storey complex of homes and shops, it is now a mass of crumbling concrete, wire, and detritus – items of everyday life, from coloured quilts to toothpaste tubes.

Close by lay the body of a revered Buddhist monk, wrapped in a brown blanket tied with chord. Friends had scrambled through wreckage to find him, but said they could not afford a car to get him back to his monastery for cremation. "We will have to leave him with the authorities," one said.

Many of the modern buildings appear hardly damaged, though some of their walls show long cracks. But along the streets, concrete blocks tumble into the road and the ornately carved beams of traditional buildings are splintered. A bed dangled precariously from a first-floor room: the front wall had simply slid into the street. Older brick and mud dwellings disintegrated.

But even as Yushu counts the cost of this disaster, people are worrying about what they will do next. Tent settlements have already appeared in town squares, at the race track and along the riverside. Those whose homes appear intact are too frightened to return.

Some residents have acquired the official government shelters, or salvaged tents from their own homes. But many were bedding down for a second night in sub-zero temperatures, with only quilts salvaged from their wrecked homes to protect them. Others huddled in their jackets around fires built from planks pulled out of the rubble. With an altitude of 3,700 metres (12,140ft), and snow still on the high mountain peaks, Yushu is icy even in spring.

"There's not enough food, not enough water. They send in trucks with dry noodles and everyone runs for them," said Chenle, a monk, who had gathered with friends in a woodland encampment. "During the night we huddle up together just to keep warm."

The remoteness of the area has not helped relief efforts. On Wednesday a few heavy diggers could be seen trundling the 500 miles from Qinghai's capital, Xining, along a twisting, rutted, mountainous road. Some had already got to the town, but much of the rescue work had been done by residents themselves, often with their bare hands. Although a huge number of relief teams had flown in, even the specialist rescue workers in orange-jumpsuits were using shovels. Just a handful had high-tech equipment such as cutting gear.

In the afternoon hundreds listened to the Chinese prime minister, Wen Jiabao, as he made pledges about the rescue. Many survivors felt they had largely relied on themselves, though others suggested the event had simply outpaced the authorities' ability to cope.

"They are doing something, but the results are not so good. In many places people need much more help. Maybe there are just too many people to deal with," said Perwe, 44, a local man.

Some saw the disaster as just another blow. One monk said: "Since 2008 things have not been good for Tibetans."

That was the year riots in Lhasa led to unrest that rippled across the Tibetan plateau, then was rapidly suppressed by the authorities.

But amid the devastation, some had good reason to celebrate. Gama Tenzin's family was one of three crammed into a tent on the outskirts of the town, short of food and warm clothing. But he had pulled his 36-year-old wife and their one-month-old baby alive from the wreckage. The disaster had been enough to make the couple reconsider their future. "We used to have cattle but we moved into town 10 years ago because we wanted our children to go to school. Now I'm thinking I want to go back to the grasslands," Gama Tenzin said. "I  don't have livestock now but maybe I could look after someone else's. At least it's a safer place."

Jiegu's inhabitants no longer trust their town.

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