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关注5.12四川边远地区救灾工作进展
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Relief Work Is Blunted In Remote Regions In China
China has mobilized one of the largest relief operations in its modern history, to aid victims of Monday's epic earthquake. But as a trek into one of the worst hit areas shows, the effort is falling short for many victims.
In the town of Beichuan, about two kilometers from the nearest functioning road, rescuers dug frantically through the rubble of a wrecked middle school. At other schools in the area, they were able to pull out survivors. Beichuan sits in the heart of a county with the same name that has accounted for an estimated 5,000 deaths -- roughly a third of the nearly 15,000 deaths officially reported so far.
Further into town, amid a tangle of toppled buildings and giant boulders from the surrounding mountains, there is an eerie silence penetrated by the cries of trapped survivors who aren't being reached.
One man dangles upside down over a hole near a battered building, his left leg pinned under a car-size boulder above. Rescue workers say they know he is there but say there are too many other victims to deal with and nothing they can do without heavier equipment.
'I feel like I'm already dead,' he says.
The magnitude-7.9 earthquake that rocked southwestern China's Sichuan province Monday afternoon dealt rescuers an especially cruel challenge, because much of its damage was done in remote, mountainous areas that are hard to reach.
China's government mobilized quickly in the hours after the quake, the country's worst natural disaster in more than 30 years. And by all accounts, the relief effort has been enormous -- including the largest airlift, the official Xinhua news agency says, in the history of the two-million-member People's Liberation Army, which is running the campaign. Nearly 100,000 military personnel have been deployed to the disaster zone. Amid inclement weather and a series of aftershocks that has complicated relief efforts, soldiers have in some cases parachuted into areas too isolated to be reached in other ways.
Yet in locations across the disaster zone, the relief work has also at times appeared disorganized or of limited effectiveness. Even some accessible areas were still waiting for relief workers or essential equipment more than two days after the quake struck. Homeless victims have had to sleep uncovered in the rain for lack of tents. Bottled water and gasoline are already running out in places. Poor sanitation in refugee centers threatens to exacerbate the misery by causing illness or disease.
Other equally large challenges loom. Officials say they haven't yet made plans for what to do with the homeless, who may number in the hundreds of thousands.
'It's right to consider rebuilding up front, but we don't have specific plans yet,' said Wang Zhenyao, director of the Disaster Relief Division at the Ministry of Civil Affairs. He says the priority is still rescuing survivors.
The official death toll of the quake had risen to 14,463 as of late Wednesday afternoon in China, Xinhua reported. More than 14,000 were listed as missing, nearly 26,000 buried in debris, and 64,746 were injured, many of them severely.
The number of dead seems almost certain to rise. On Wednesday, reporters from Xinhua reached Wenchuan County, the site of the quake's epicenter, for the first time. Bad weather and landslides had kept relief workers from reaching the town for more than 24 hours after the quake. The Xinhua reporters found the situation 'worse than expected.' In one town, Yingxiu, local officials said that only 2,300 of the 10,000 residents appear to have survived.
Among the dangers that threatened to further aggravate the plight of survivors in the quake area was damage from to some of the region's many dams. Of particular concern was the Zipingpu dam, which sits upriver from the battered tourist town of Dujiangyan, and which was cracked by the quake. An official at the Ministry of Water Resources said an expert team sent to examine Zipingpu has reported so far that the dam's structure is stable and safe. But the official said the inspection work is continuing.
Financial donations and offers of assistance poured in from foreign countries and international relief groups. On Wednesday, the first large shipment of foreign aid -- 24 tons of tents and other materials from Russia -- arrived in Chengdu, the Sichuanese provincial capital about 90 kilometers from the epicenter.
China's government has expressed gratitude for the offers of assistance, but so far hasn't let foreign emergency-response teams participate in rescue efforts, despite signs that medical personnel and other resources are becoming strained.
That has proven frustrating for some foreign aid workers eager to help while their expertise could still save lives.
'We wonder now if our rescue dogs will ever have an opportunity to help, because chance of survival of people buried under debris is said to drop after 72 hours,' said Yumi Kurata, a spokeswoman for the Japan Rescue Association. Her group, formed after Japan's deadly Kobe earthquake in 1995, has offered to dispatch its dogs and experts, but the offer was rejected by Chinese authorities who said the quake-affected area remains too hard to access.
Japan learned the hard way that turning down expertise can prove painful during its Kobe quake, which killed more than 6,400 people. In the immediate aftermath of that quake, foreign rescue dogs were quarantined and medical-licensing bureaucracy kept U.S. doctors from treating patients for three days after their arrival -- actions that were criticized later.
Myanmar's military government, meanwhile, has come under intense criticism for its refusal of foreign aid after this month's devastating cyclone.
China has said conditions in the disaster zone make it impractical for foreign aid teams to come at this point.
'Now even our military troops are not able to get there,' says Mr. Wang, the Disaster Relief Department director. He said authorities are still discussing overseas offers.
Some foreign experts say the Chinese decision is understandable. Language and cultural factors can make it difficult to accommodate foreigners in the chaos of a relief effort. In the Kobe quake, The Association of Medical Doctors of Asia lost valuable time arranging interpreters, transportation and accommodations for a team of French doctors who came to assist, says Shigeru Suganami, the Japan-based organization's chief. His organization is offering assistance to China now, but 'I really understand why China says they don't need help from overseas,' he says.
Kate Redman, a spokeswoman in London for Save the Children, a nonprofit aid organization, praised China's efforts so far, saying no international group could have responded so quickly.
'In this particular case, this is definitely the right way to go about it,' she says of the government's approach.
A small number of foreign organizations are participating, but are less involved in the emergency response work. Two representatives of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies accompanied Chinese aid workers to Sichuan this week, and Beijing has accepted about $230,000 in emergency funding from the umbrella organization to replenish its own existing stockpiles of emergency relief materials.
The limitations of the official response were evident Wednesday night in Pengzhou, a town 60 kilometers from the epicenter, as waves of military trucks arrived carrying thousands of people from their ruined homes in the nearby mountains. Deposited in the dusty town center, they waited for periodic distributions of food, with no instructions about what to do next. Some were starting to get sick, and unable to get medicine because they had no money.
Storefronts in Pengzhou are now labeled with handwritten lists of villages on them, so people know how to find their neighbors.
Deng Jun, 24 years old, helped guide more than 400 people from his village to the nearest town in order to get rescued. The group had to spend the night outside in the rain and Mr. Deng says his 9-month old baby is now sick.
'His nose is running and he's been crying for days. We didn't have anything to feed him since Monday,' Mr. Deng says. 'I took him to the hospital but they turned us away because I don't have my identification card.' Mr. Deng says he tried to buy medicine in the pharmacy, but couldn't afford it. The price had been raised by a third.
Another several hundred people from Mr. Deng's village are still there, he says, because they were injured or too old to walk out with him.
Some distraught victims were angry at what they said was an inadequate response.
'This government is a real shame,' said Yang Gang, who had traveled hundreds of kilometers from Inner Mongolia, where he works, to his home in Beichuan to search for his son. Dressed in army surplus clothes and carrying a woven basket packed with supplies, he pored through the rubble of his son's school, unsuccessfully. 'Where are the officials? They all ran away? Who was there to help us? What could we do -- there were only a few of us with no tools.'
Helping him was a man who had come home to look for his wife. He wore a bicycle helmet for protection from the falling rock. 'I was there yesterday morning at five. I rode my motorcycle until I couldn't buy anymore gas. Then I got a bicycle,' he says. But 'My wife is gone.'
The devastation in Beichuan is overwhelming. Huge parts of the town, nestled in a valley, were buried under the collapsing mountains around it. The rubble-strewn streets are littered with bodies, some pinned under rocks, other twisted in cars that crushed like soda cans. Some corpses line the side of the road, with blankets thrown over them. One women sits on a giant pile of rubble, sobbing and saying the same name again and again.
Many rescuers were hard at work, particularly around the collapsed school. Surviving children pulled from the rubble were carried in the arms of rescuers out of the town and up a muddy slope to safety.
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But handfuls of other rescue workers wander around aimlessly, unable to help without heavy equipment needed to move boulders and chunks of ruined construction. On the road leading in, a giant logistical bottleneck has kept hundreds of trucks and perhaps thousands of rescuers from reaching the ruined town.
Beichuan's plight has drawn attention around China and has attracted volunteers.
'There are dozens of people still in there,' says one man, from Chengdu, pointing to a bus that was shattered by falling rocks as it turned out of the long-distance bus station. 'They say it's too hard to save people here,' he says. But he doesn't plan to leave.
通往北川的道路在距县城约两公里的地方就被震断了，救援人员在城中一座垮塌中学的废墟上发疯似地挖掘着。在县城的另一所学校，已有幸存者从瓦砾中被抢救出来。县城位于北川的中心部位，据估计该县在地震中约有5,000人遇难，大约占官方迄今所公布地震死亡人数的三分之一。
往县城里边走去，到处是倾倒的建筑和从周围山上滚下的巨石，城镇中弥漫着一种令人不安的死寂，只有被埋在瓦砾堆下的地震幸存者间或发出的呼救声提醒人们，他们还未获救。
一名男子被倒挂在一座垮塌建筑的破口处，他的左腿被一块轿车大小的滚石压住了。救援人员说，他们知道他在那里，但由于有太多其他受难者要处理，在没有重型设备的情况下他们暂时对他无能为力。
“我觉着自己已经死了，”这名男子说。
周一下午发生在中国西南四川省的这场7.9级地震对救援者提出了特别严峻的挑战，因为地震中受灾最重的是那些救援人员难以到达的偏远山区。
在这场中国30多年来最严重的自然灾害发生数小时后，中国政府就迅速动员组织起了救援工作。无论以何种标准衡量，救灾行动的规模都堪称巨大，比如由军队负责的救灾物资空运，据新华社说这是中国军史上规模最大的一次空运行动。目前已有近10万名军人被派往灾区。恶劣的天气和持续不断的余震给救灾工作增添了更多困难，在一些通过其他交通方式无法抵达的灾区“孤岛”，军队甚至派出了空降士兵前去救援。
然而在灾区的许多地方，救援工作有时也会显得缺乏组织或效果不佳。北京方面在周四早间表示，已同意日本政府派遣专业救援人员赴四川地震灾区协助救援行动；此举或许意味着中国政府承认中国需要外国救援队提供帮助。
在地震发生两天多之后，甚至一些对外交通并未断绝的地区也还在等待救援人员和重要救灾设备。由于缺乏帐篷，不少无家可归的灾民不得不在雨天露宿街头。一些地方的瓶装水和汽油已经用尽。避难中心糟糕的卫生设施有可能引发疾病，加重灾民的苦难。
还有其他严峻的挑战在迫近。政府官员说他们尚未制定安置无家可归者的计划，这部分人有可能数以十万计。
民政部救灾救济司司长王振耀说，提早考虑重建是对的，但我们还没有明确的计划。他说当务之急仍是抢救幸存者。
据新华社报导，截至北京时间周三晚间，官方公布的地震死亡人数已上升至14,463人。有超过14,000人被登记为失踪人口，近26,000人被埋在废墟下，有64,746人受伤，其中许多伤势严重。
死亡人数看来肯定还会增加。周三，新华社记者震后首次到达了震中汶川县。受恶劣天气和山体滑坡影响，地震发生24小时以后救援人员仍未能抵达汶川。新华社记者发现汶川的灾情比他们预想的糟。在汶川县映秀镇，当地官员说全镇10,000名居民中幸存的似乎只有2,300人。
灾区的一些水库在地震中受损，这有可能加重幸存者的困境。紫坪铺水库的情况尤其令人担心，它位于重灾区都江堰市的上游，地震中也受到了波及。水利部的一位官员说，派去检查紫坪铺水库情况的一个专家组已报告说，水库坝体结构目前稳定、安全。但这位官员也表示，检查工作现在仍在进行。
不少国家和国际救援组织纷纷向中国捐款并表示愿意提供地震救援。周三，总重24吨的帐篷和其他物品从俄罗斯运抵四川省会成都，这是运达灾区的第一批国际救援物品。成都距震中约90公里。
中国政府对外国援助表示感谢，尽管有迹象显示灾区的医护人员和救援物资开始出现紧张，但政府直到周四尚未邀请外国紧急救援队参与救灾工作。
这令一些外国救援人员感到沮丧，他们急于赶在自己的救援专长仍有机会拯救灾民生命之前前往救灾。
日本救援协会(Japan Rescue Association)提出派自己配备了搜救犬的救援队前往救灾，这些搜救犬在从废墟中寻找幸存者方面训练有素。但它周三表示，自己一直未获准前往中国。
非营利组织拯救儿童(Save the Children)在伦敦的发言人凯特•雷德曼(Kate Redman)对中国迄今为止的救灾工作表示了赞赏，说没有哪家国际组织能够做出如此迅捷的救灾反应。
她谈到中国政府目前的做法时说，就这件事而言，这无疑是处理问题的正确做法。
北川的灾情引起了全国的关注，并吸引来了一批救灾志愿者。
一位成都来的志愿者指着一辆公共汽车说，那里有几十人等待救援。这辆车在驶出长途汽车站时被滚落的巨石砸毁。他说，人们都说要救出车里的人太困难了，但他不准备离开。
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