The Earthquake

With the population density that China has, disasters become catastrophes, and that is unfortunately what has happened with this earthquake.

(Picture of a trapped earthquake victim. If you're interested in the news coverage here in China, you can visit these English websites: www.shanghaidaily.com or www.chinadaily.com.cn).

Our family (and Ayi) may be the only people in Shanghai who didn't feel the earthquake yesterday. We were in our 31st floor apartment yesterday at 2:30 pm when the earthquake occurred, but felt nothing. We already had plans to meet friends at the Shanghai Aquarium which is a 15-minute walk from our place, through Lujiazui which is the financial center of Shanghai, basically your downtown Manhattan (New York, not Kansas!).

We were running a tad late (since we needed to process our season passes) so we decided to hop on the shuttle bus at 3:10 pm instead of walking there. On the way there we noticed thousands of people in their business suits outside of their buildings on talking on their cell phones. I thought maybe there had been a bomb/terrorist threat and that they evacuated the possibly-targeted buildings. I asked the driver, but he didn't know what was going on (so maybe there are four adults in Shanghai who didn't feel the quake).

As we arrived at the aquarium at 3:20 pm, there were lots tons of people there as well. And as we know, cell phones are cameras, so as soon as our girls came off the van people swarmed us to take their pictures. At that time a fellow Olmsted Scholar called my cell phone and asked if we had felt the earthquake. That was when we found out what was going on. The aquarium was still open, so we went and had a wonderful time with our friends at the aquarium.

When we got home I got on the Internet to read about the earthquake. It was a big one: 7.9 on the Richter scale near the city of Chengdu in Sichuan province. Chengdu has a population of 11 million, that puts it puts it at #58 of China's biggest cities - amazing, isn't it?

The initial report stated: 100 dead, 34 injured.

We wish that was the extent of it, but that just didn't seem possible for such a major earthquake where the epicenter was only 50 miles away from a city the size of Chengdu.

Then the numbers started increasing. The latest that we've seen is 12,000 dead and 60,000 missing, and unfortunately those numbers will rise further.

One of the saddest stories we've seen so far is about a school that collapsed that has trapped 900 students. In a country that has a one-child policy, that is 900 families whose futures are trapped in that collapsed school. This was one of the first stories that we've read, but we haven't seen any updates on it, yet.

It's amazing to think that this earthquake could be felt in Shanghai and Beijing. This is analogous (both in types of cities as well in distances) to an earthquake happening in Kansas City (ok, your pick, Missouri or Kansas), and people in Washington D.C. and New York City evacuating out of their skyscrapers (ok, no skyscrapers in D.C. by law, but it's just an analogy).

Shanghai and Beijing are over 1,000 miles from Chengdu. Here's a map. Chengdu is in the middle of the country, then you have Beijing on the northeastern coast, Shanghai on the central coast, and Hong Kong on the southeastern coast:

I guess our "little" 34-story building didn't sway like the 60-100 story buildings of the financial district.

(I didn't have my camera with me to take pictures of all the businessmen/women outside while we were there. I took this picture on Labor Day - it's of the financial district with Jin Mao (world's sixth tallest) and the soon-to-be completed World Finance Center (will be the world's tallest completed building) dominating the picture. The district has a lot of "green" areas, and you can see other skyscrapers in the background).

While we are safe, our thoughts and prayers have been with those who have been affected by this earthquake.