Word: dujiangyan
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Zhang Xuede stands near what was once the Xinjian Elementary School surrounded by mud, debris, twisted metal and slabs of concrete. The 70-year-old has kept vigil in the city of Dujiangyan for the better part of a day after a 7.9-magnitude earthquake rocked China's Sichuan province on May 12, flattening the school his grandson attended. "After the quake hit, I ran to the school and started removing rubble," Zhang says. "I uncovered several children. Some were dead, some were still alive. But I couldn't find my grandson." Unlike many of the other parents and relatives...
...miles (50 km) west of the Sichuan provincial capital of Chengdu. Here, where the Sichuan plain meets the foothills of the Himalayas, at least two schools and one hospital suffered severe damage during the quake. Down the block from the elementary school, another group has gathered outside the Dujiangyan City Chinese Medicine Hospital that partially collapsed during the quake, trapping more than 100 patients. One woman, who wouldn't give her name, says her father was being treated in the hospital when the May 12 quake hit, and his wife and her cousins were visiting. Seven family members...
...streets of Dujiangyan the rescue troops are ubiquitous. Military vehicles are lined up, and People's Armed Police and People's Liberation Army soldiers, kitted out in crisp, matching green camouflage, are battling rain and rubble as they try to reach trapped survivors and control emotional crowds. On a downtown street corner a group of armed police kept people back as a ladder truck lifted rescuers up to the sixth floor of a damaged apartment building. An old man peered through a window, waiting to be taken out. But when the ladder arrived he turned and ran back into...
...night fell Tuesday, the family of missing residents gathered around and demanded they continue. As they stood in the street, their debate illuminated only by car lights, a loudspeaker truck cruised by with a message: "Please stay calm. The State Council, the Central Committee, the Sichuan, Chengdu and Dujiangyan governments are trying their best to help. Earthquakes are not something that mankind can avoid...
...Likun, 56, has seen nothing of government aid. He, his mother and brothers escaped from their three-story house outside Dujiangyan as it crumbled in the quake. Now they are living on a sidewalk underneath a large red, blue and white plastic tarp. These makeshift tents are everywhere in the city, used by people whose homes were destroyed or who are too scared of the regular aftershocks to spend a night in a building. "Nobody has been here to help us," Fu says...