Earthquake shakes China

Yesterday there was a big earthquake in Sichuan province (highlighted left), 60 miles outside of the capital, Chengdu. 10,000 people are reported dead at the time of posting, and the shocks were felt as far as Shanghai (in the east), Beijing (in the north) and even in Bangkok, Thailand! I think some of the best coverage is on danwei.org, click here to read blogger Jeremy Goldkorn's post on it.

From where I sit in Beijing, I was having one of my crazy Mondays yesterday where I was literally frantic at my computer most of the morning. Around 3pm, I started to feel a bit dizzy, and thought I'd been staring at the computer too long. I sat back to give myself a break and looked out the windows. Being in a corner office, with windows in two directions, I could literally see our building swaying, back and forth, as if we were being blown about in a big gust of wind. We're on the 19th floor of a 30 floor skyscraper, and I've never felt more like I was in a big jenga block than at that moment. You had to hold your hand on something to try to steady yourself. The shaking lasted about 30 seconds, which felt like approximately 3 hours to me! Afterwards there was a lot of excitement in the office as people chattered about the earthquake, although clearly shaken, I went back into work mode and acted utterly annoyed 30 minutes later when we were asked to evacuate the building. 30 minutes later, really? So here I go huffing and puffing and cursing as I trek down 19 flights of stairs in three inch heels, kicking myself for not bringing my laptop and a coke zero from the fridge, which I will surely need to occupy myself for what is about to occur. What does occur, you ask? China at its best, I tell you. I was able to access news of the earthquake (via my blackberry which I would never leave upstairs!) on a Spanish newspaper site, but not on Chinese sites, yet... The US earthquake site (USGS) had preliminary stats on the size and location of the earthquake, the China earthquake site was, predictably, down. A sign of the times was the role that Twitter played in finding out information about the earthquake moments after it happened. The best part of the evacuation though was the fact that we were evacuated to the first floor, so that we could wait in the lobby for the building to fall on us in case there was to be more tremors. After waiting for almost two hours, the elevators were opened up for us to get our personal belongings and go home for the day. Danwei has pics of people evacuating into the streets of Beijing, but in our building, we evacuated into the lobby.

Yesterday was pretty scary, it was determined that the tremors felt in Beijing were a 3.9 (it was 7.9 in Sichuan). This has inspired me to look up what one is supposed to do in an earthquake, since clearly, this Florida girl doesn't know! (I can however, give you a detailed demonstration of how to act in a hurricane if you happen to find yourself stuck in an elementary school when one hits). The San Francisco Chronicle website has a great list of do's and don'ts for during and after the quake, as well as a list of what to put into an earthquake kit to have on standby in case one strikes.

For those of you that don't know China well, Sichuan province is the home of the pandas, and is a beautiful place. I visited Chengdu a few years ago with my family and we really enjoyed it.




A panda at the panda research and breeding center outside of Chengdu - 2005 Dorné family trip to China

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