By Bob Swansbrough
Over the three-day Dragon Boat Festival national holiday (June 14-16), one of my students took me to visit his hometown in Sichuan Province. We then drove to the nearby city of Hanwang, struck hard by the disastrous 2008 Sichuan earthquake. Hanwang is located about 50 miles northwest from Chengdu, the provincial capital where I’ve been teaching. The earthquake killed about 70,000 people in this western province of China, with 18,000 still missing-presumed buried under the twisted steel and concrete rubble.
The Hanwang city leaders decided to leave parts of the ruined city untouched as a memorial to those who died. The site poignantly highlighted to me and other visitors the devastating damage of the May 12, 2008, earthquake, measured at 8.0 on the Richter scale. The clock on the city’s bell tower eerily stopped at the exact moment of the tremor-2:28 p.m. on a Wednesday afternoon. Students were in classrooms, businessmen in their offices and mothers and grandparents home with young children when their lives dramatically changed.
This rural Sichuan city, while not affluent, was a sizeable city by Western standards, with many six-story apartment buildings and a busy business section. A military factory producing turbines, destroyed but later rebuilt miles away, provided many jobs. Government office buildings caved in, apartment buildings pancaked downward, and hospitals and clinics buckled from the powerful quake.
But most tragically, about 7,000 schools in Sichuan Province collapsed. In one Hanwang school, 700 students died in their classrooms. Initially, the executive vice governor Wei Hong confirmed that 19,065 schoolchildren had died. The Reuters news service estimated that about 9,000 children were killed by the earthquake. However, on May 7, 2009, a year later, the Chinese government officially declared that 5,446 students died in the Sichuan earthquake.