Reconstruction: Evidence of an Earthquake

A ravaged community in Sichuan will be rebuilt. – By Beate Engelen

Gong Sheng talking with Liu Yingquan (in a blue shirt)

On a hot day in mid-July one of several teams from Amity was back in Sichuan. Two months had passed since the day when the earthquake struck during the sleepy early-afternoon hours of May 12th. The event lasted no longer than two minutes but it was so strong that it killed around 70,000 people and made 1.5 million homeless. On that day in May, Amity staff had arrived at the scene only hours after the disaster to start emergency relief operations. Now, staff members were back to prepare for post-disaster rehabilitation work. I had joined the team to find out how farmers in Sichuan were coping with the situation and what kind of rehabilitation work they thought would make most sense.

With the organization’s long experience in community-based development work, Amity wanted to work with a poor rural community somewhere near Mianzhu, one of the hardest hit areas. Here reconstruction help was indeed urgently needed. Fortunately, an official from the local government of Mianzhu agreed to show us the way to a village called Woyun.

We drove for some time alongside green fields, shady banks with trees and the odd ruined farmhouse here and there until we finally arrived at a place that must have been a village in the past. What spread before our eyes was not much more than piles of bricks, broken furniture, tumbled walls and ruins whose empty windows looked like hollow eyes. People were sitting in the shade of their roughly built sheds and tents amid the debris. In a word, this place was the epitome of destruction. We had unmistakably arrived at the disaster zone.

When my colleague Huang Qingrui and I flew into Chengdu on 17 July I speculated what it would be like to enter a disaster zone. I had asked myself where exactly a disaster zone started. By which signs or landmarks would I be able to tell that we had arrived at the scene of a 8.0-magnitude earthquake? Of course, Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan, a mere 110 km from the epicenter, had suffered some damage. But to my untrained eye, Chengdu had not changed a bit since my last visit half a year ago. There was a blood donation station next to our hotel but it was closed each time I walked past. Apparently two months after the quake, immediate rescue efforts, which had included blood donations, had already come to a halt in Chengdu.

On our way to Mianzhu the next day, signs of a recent natural disaster became more visible. Cracks appeared in the concrete road surface not long after we had left Chengdu and there were damaged houses here and there. As we approached Mianzhu, more and more red banners laced the road, urging people to unite and not complain about their fate. Then, in the outskirts of Mianzhu, blue army tents appeared at the roadside, pointing the way to the rescue camps ahead: rows of white tents and barracks stretching as far as the eye could see. In May, the first residents of these camps had been city folk from Mianzhu who had been forced to leave their dangerously damaged flats. But later the camps filled with people who were fleeing the hinterland because they had run out of food or were in danger of being killed by landslides.

Destruction in the countryside

But the refugee camps were not what we were looking for that day. We headed for the countryside where, experts say, people suffered much more in the aftermath of the earthquake than victims in the cities because country folk got much less attention. Standing amid the ruins of Woyun, I could easily believe that this was true.

Strolling along the main road we met two friendly old men chatting in the shade of a tall tree. Bricks from the rubble of the house behind them served them as stools. One of the old men wore boxer shorts, flip-flops and a blue shirt reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution. This was Liu Yingquan, a 72-year-old farmer with a big smile on his face. The two men offered us little plastic seats so we could join in their talk under the tree.

The rubble around us turned out to be the remains of Mr. Liu’s own house. He had built it thirteen years ago when his son wanted to make a good match. The son did marry the woman of his choice but all of Mr. Liu’s investments had been lost on May 12.

When the ground started shaking, Mr. Liu was out on the main dirt path in front of his house drying mustard seeds. At first he had the impression that there was something wrong with him so he knelt down in order to steady himself. But reality soon dawned on him: “When the buildings around me started collapsing I realized that it was not my health!” The strongest earthquake ever measured in the area was about to destroy his hometown. 24 villagers died that day.

Tang Zhengxi survived in a collapsing school

Tang Zhengxi, a pretty 13-year-old girl who listened in on our talk, had been in her classroom on the second floor of her school when the walls started shaking. Unlike most of the other children, Tang Zhengxi did not run for the exit but – following an instinct – hid in the corner of a room. She had made the right choice. The part of the building where she had hidden did not collapse. She survived physically unharmed, but she was obviously suffering from her traumatic experience. During our chat she started crying. Fears still haunted her, especially at night, she said. Nevertheless, Zhengxi had been lucky. Two students and one teacher died that day in her school and many more were injured. According to official government statistics, in the whole county 7 schools with 391 classrooms were destroyed by the earthquake.

In Woyun, over 90% of the homes had collapsed, and even those structures which were not completely destroyed will have to be demolished because it is no longer safe to stay in them. The destruction in this flattened village seemed much greater than in the city of Mianzhu. I blamed this in part on the fact that village houses usually consist of brick walls and wood-framed roofs, which is cheaper than concrete.

Need for quake-proof homes

Poor quality building work does not come as a surprise. Farmers in Woyun had never been in a position to build earthquake-proof homes, not just because they do not earn enough money. The area has not seen any serious earthquakes in the last 100 years and until recently, the area around Mianzhu was considered a “moderate” seismic risk zone, according to the Chinese Building Code. Opinions on this have probably changed after May 12th.

Villagers of Woyun joined us to share their experiences.

In the blue distance behind us, we saw the Longmen Mountain Range rise steeply out of the plains, indicating that we were close to the fault line. This is the area where the Tibetan Plateau collides with the Sichuan Basin, or – explained in broader terms – where the Indian subcontinent pushes into Eurasia. The tension between the two plates had built up so much that the ground moved up to three meters in the earthquake zone.

Around the time we visited Woyun, recurring aftershocks kept people in a state of nervous disquiet and watchfulness. Mr. Liu and other villagers, who were gathering during our talk, said they had trouble sleeping through the night, waking at intervals and listening for possible signs of an imminent tremor. We could see beds which had been hauled out of the houses for people to get a better night’s sleep. Villagers also worried about burglars taking advantage of the fact that possessions could not be easily protected in the temporary houses and tents.

Lack of funds

Mr. Liu and his wife had just finished building their make-shift home from the recycled wooden planks of their shattered house. They had hired a young man who was able to put up the structure but the quality was not very high. In winter, wind and rain will blow through the gaps between the planks. For now, however, he and his wife are happy to have a fixed shelter at all. 10% of the village population were still living in tents at the time of our visit. Others had built temporary shacks.

People of Woyun said that rebuilding their homes was their highest priority, preferably before winter starts. The prospects of achieving this goal are doubtful, however, if people are left to their own devices. The government has promised to give between 16,000 and 22,000 RMB to each family but homes are much more expensive than that. A common house costs around 70,000 RMB in this area, sometimes even more. How would people be able to raise so much money?

How to make money

Traditionally, farmers in Woyun grow corn, wheat, rice and rapeseed – all of them low-value crops. Even though this kind of work is tough, farming is mainly done by women, who do it by hand because hardly any agricultural machinery is available to them. After the earthquake, the future of Sichuan farmers looks grim: 1.15 million of them had lost their means of production, the vice-governor of Sichuan said during a press conference in early July. Almost all of the livestock has perished in the earthquake and when harvest begins, there will be no place to store the crops. Storage rooms, too, were destroyed or heavily damaged in the earthquake.

Those families who send their younger members to work in the cities are able to earn some extra income. However, since almost all of the farmers have only an elementary school education, the greater part of the migrant workers from Woyun can only do odd jobs – if they find any at all. Job hunting was not easy even before the earthquake: now it has become a real problem. 600,000 migrant workers lost their jobs as a result of the disaster, according to official figures. Mianzhu has already held two big job fairs where companies from Jiangsu Province, Mianzhu’s government-assigned partner, offer jobs to skilled laborers and migrant workers. But demand for jobs exceeds supply.

When we asked him how he planned to raise enough money to rebuild his house, Mr. Liu said that he would go on with farm work. His son and daughter-in-law live in Chengdu as migrant workers. Yet they have only been able to save very little money. Regarding the remaining funds needed, Mr. Liu said, he would just wait and hope for the best.

During our talk more and more villagers walked up to listen and comment. They all had their individual memories of the earthquake to tell. One man recalled that the earth shook sideways and up and down at the same time. At that moment, he recalled, he just wanted to survive. Luckily, 12 May was an unusually cool day so people were still out in the fields during the hot early afternoon hours. Had it been hotter that day, the number of casualties would have been even higher.

Villagers in Woyun will start harvesting their crops in a few weeks from now. A little later the weather will turn colder and Woyun will get the rain and icy winds which are common around here. Over 900 houses need to be rebuilt to provide every family with a new home. Amity – advised by members of the Hong Kong Institute of Architects and the Hong Kong Institute of Planners – has decided to take on this task, but the construction of new homes will require special attention. Life in the disaster zone is dangerous not only because of landslides, aftershocks or the “quake lakes” – unstable bodies of water created during the earthquake by blocked rivers.

Two old women try to cool down in front of their prefabricated home.

Geologists expect more big earthquakes to happen. “Similar earthquakes are to be expected rather more often than normal in the near future, since all the other faults in the region are now under tension as a result of the [May 12] earthquake,” Domenico Giardini, a professor of Seismology and Geodynamics at ETH in Zurich wrote in a recent report. It is therefore crucial to seismically upgrade every single farmhouse which is rebuilt in the area.

Helping people in Woyun restore their community is sure to be a big challenge for Amity in the coming months, maybe years. There are not only the earthquake-safe homes which need to be built. Amity also plans to introduce environmentally friendly biogas systems and other devices that will improve the infrastructure of the village. Villagers will be involved in every stage of the decision-making, implementing and monitoring process of the project. To make sure the implementation is efficient and transparent, Amity has opened an office in the village. Experienced staff from Nanjing will take turns working here in order to spur change in the lives of people like Mr. Liu and Tang Zhengxi.

Meeting Mr. Liu and some of the other villagers has left a deep impression on me. These people have lost almost everything, they live in the middle of a disaster zone and face a highly uncertain future. Still, they seem resolved to pick up their lives again. I wonder if the cracks in the road, the refugee camps, the ruins of Woyun and all the other signs of disaster will still be visible when I visit again. I am sure many of them will be gone.