Sorry, Bill. No happy pictures from the 2004 Indian Ocean hurricane. Nor the 1918 Spanish
flu pandemic. Nor the 1921-22 Soviet Union drought. Don't have any from the 2004 Thailand
tsunami either.

Do you have any happy pictures?

Schools Fell While Other Buildings Held;
China Investigates Construction as Parents’ Grief Turns to Anger

By Ariana Eunjung Cha
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, May 23, 2008

MIANZHU, China -- The day the earthquake hit was supposed to be a special one for Ding
Yao. Her hair done up in pigtails, she was sitting in the front of a fourth-grade
classroom, waiting for the teacher to hand out prizes to students who had the highest
scores on a math test. She wasn't sure, but she was hopeful she would get one.

One floor above her, fifth-graders Sang Xingpeng, the class troublemaker, and Peng Xinyin,
the tall girl who loved to sing, were enjoying their midday break.

Outside, third-grader Zhou Yang was running late, busy playing with friends and chasing
bees.

This, according to teachers, parents and students interviewed, was the scene at Fuxin No.
2 Primary School a few minutes before 2:28 p.m. on May 12 -- when a massive earthquake
ripped through China's Sichuan province in the country's worst natural disaster in 30
years. By the end of the day, 127 of the school's 320 students would die, buried in a mess
of concrete chunks and flying glass.

Since the quake, parents' grief has turned to anger.

Why, they ask, did the school collapse when other nearby buildings, including government
offices, the teachers' dormitory and even an old classroom building housing pet rabbits,
withstood the quake?

The same question is being asked all over Sichuan, as residents have started to notice
that, on street after street, schools collapsed while most government buildings did not.
In Mianzhu county, a quarter of the 43 primary and secondary schools caved in, leaving
more than 1,000 students dead, while the gleaming government complex remained fully
operational and is now a staging area for emergency rescue and cleanup operations.

In total, nearly 7,000 schools have been reported destroyed in Sichuan by the quake; that
figure could rise as reconstruction crews reach the hardest-hit areas.

China's leaders have launched an investigation into why so many schools collapsed. Jiang
Weixin, the minister of housing and urban-rural construction, said this week that
authorities "cannot rule out the possibility that there may have been shoddy work and
inferior materials during the construction" of some school buildings.

On Thursday, Mianzhu county announced that it would form a special committee to
investigate the construction of the school in Fuxin. The principal, Wang Weiyong, asked
parents to be patient and wait for experts to assess what happened here. But Liu Bo, a
deputy director of the Mianzhu Education Bureau, said in an interview that he had already
gone through the documentation regarding the school's annual inspections and that he
believed it was perfectly safe.

"What happened isn't the result of a dangerous building," Liu said. "This tragedy is the
result of a natural disaster."

Parents who have lost their children say the truth is in the rubble.

Zhang Longfu, 39, whose 12-year-old daughter, Zhang Ju, died at the school, said there is
no evidence that the building ever had a solid frame. In the ruins, other than the
concrete, there are only tiles and a few pieces of twisted metal cables.

"This building is totally a 'bad tofu' project," Zhang Longfu said, using the term in
China for cheap, shoddy construction work. "Look at it -- it's not properly done. We feel
it is wrong for kids to die this way."
The Nightmare Begins

On May 12, the first sign of the nightmare to come was the dust.

At 2:28 p.m., Zhou Yang was in front of the school playing with friends when the ground
shook. Dust started to emanate from the building. "I thought, 'I just had a shower. I
don't want to get dirty.' So I stayed outside," Yang later recalled.

Then the screaming began. The windows blew out. Pieces of the building started falling
off.

The quake occurred at just about the worst time for the students. Their midday break was
ending, but class hadn't yet started. That meant nearly all of the students were in the
building, but few of the school's 32 teachers were there to offer direction.

Students in Yang's third-grade class were lucky. Because they were on the first floor,
they quickly stampeded out through four exits.

In the fourth-grade classroom next door, teacher Li Mingqing was yelling: "It's an
earthquake! Run, children, run!" Li recalled seeing Ding Yao, the girl with pigtails,
moving slowly. She scooped her up, tucked the girl's head down and ran for safety.

Li's classroom had been packed with 75 students for the awards ceremony. But one of the
doors was locked. The students struggled to get through the remaining door. Only 36 made
it out.

Students in the fifth- and sixth-grade classes upstairs also started fleeing. But only so
many who could fit on the stairs at one time. A few tried to take the bridge to the
teachers' building but then changed their minds and turned around. They had been told that
they would be punished if they ever took that route.

Peng Xinyin and Sang Xingpeng were next to each other, somewhere in the middle of the
crowd.

Li, the teacher, had barely cleared the building when it collapsed. "I turned around and
looked and thought, 'What now? What now?' " she recalled.

Xinyin's mother, Zhang Xuemei, was the first parent to reach the school. She recalled
spotting her daughter's teacher and three others standing in front of the debris.

"Are all the students out?" she called out.

The teacher answered: "Only a few. Maybe five or six."

"My daughter?"

Pause. "She's still in there."

Zhang fainted, then woke up to chaos. Parents were crying and calling out their children's
names, digging through concrete chunks with bare hands. Many were bleeding from cuts. Some
teachers -- only two of them had been in the building when it fell -- joined in the
search.

Just after 3 p.m., one hysterical mother located her 10-year-old daughter and pulled her
out. She splashed water over her face. The girl was already dead.

For one family, a whole generation was wiped out. A sister and her two brothers each
discovered they had lost a child.

Rescue workers found Xinyin just after 7 p.m. She was at the bottom of the stairs, about a
yard from safety when the building caved in. There was so much debris that it took until
2:30 a.m. to free her. She had died instantly when a stone or other debris struck her
neck, a doctor told the family. Sang Xingpeng was a few steps behind her, one of his legs
in front of the other as if he was still running. He had suffocated to death.
A Town Divided

Nearly two decades ago, Xingpeng's mother, Liu Ying, was among the first to attend Fuxin.

Now 34, Liu said she remembers that soon after she and other students started at the
school, the third floor started to develop cracks.

"I couldn't imagine that after so many years they wouldn't have fixed the problems and our
kids would be dead in here," Liu said.

In the days since the quake, Fuxin has become a town divided.

Those who lost a child -- their only, because of China's one-child policy -- have bonded
together and kept a constant vigil at the school.

Those whose children survived have avoided the school and, in some cases, have decided it
is best to act as though nothing ever happened.

On Tuesday, for instance, while Liu was on her way back home from visiting the spot where
her son, Xingpeng, has been buried, a neighbor whose daughter survived told her she had
heard the semester's exams would be postponed as a result of the quake. Did Liu know
anything about that?

Liu politely shook her head and continued home, where she finds comfort in her son's
things.

There are the goldfish and turtles her husband gave Xingpeng a few days before the quake.
There's the loquat tree that he had been so eager to eat from that he counted the pieces
of fruit each day. And then there are the best things, Liu said, the signs of his
mischief: the stickers of pop stars on the walls, the broken decorations, the ruined
potatoes he pulled out from the ground before they were ready to be eaten.

Those are great human interest photos. Too bad it happened.

A moment of Silence.

Primary school students mourned during their morning assembly at a school in Tianjin
municipality.




A student at a ceremony paid respect to the earthquake victims. With more bodies
discovered, the confirmed death toll rose to 32,476, the State Council, China's cabinet,
reported. The injured numbered more than 220,000.




Mourners in Chengdu's Tianfu Square.




Students who survived when the earthquake destroyed Beichuan high school observed a silent
tribute before resuming classes at a factory training center in Mianyang, Sichuan
Province.

An injured child is comforted by his parents in his hospital bed at the 903 Hospital in
Jianguyo, China, on Friday.



A family cries after their mother's dead body was found near the rubble of a collapsed
building in Dujiangyan. Friday, May 16, 2008.



Earthquake survivors sit in a truck as they await evacuation from Beichuan, one of the
areas hit hardest by the earthquake.



Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao comforts an earthquake survivors in Qingchuan County.



[ photos from The Los Angeles Times ]

Grief in Yuyuan


A blanket over a child's body.



Inside the morgue on Wednesday afternoon, parents walked through rooms lined with bodies
on the floor, lifting sheets in the unwanted search to identify a lost child.





Families grieved and incense burned around makeshift memorials inside the morgue.



[ photos from The New York Times ]

It has been reported that these schools were relatively new (10years or less) and built to
code. The government will be hearing from their people about this situation: a grieving
parent will not hold back.

Last edited on: 05-16-2008 12:21 pm

Relatives of earthquake victims cry at a funeral house in Dujiangyan.




Chinese rescuers and volunteers worked on the debris of a collapsed kindergarten in search
of earthquake survivors in Beichuan.




A child who survived a school collapse in Mianzhu cried while lying in bed at a hospital
in Deyang.





[ all photos from The New York Times ]