After China's quake, firemen rise to rescue task

After 20 hours of persistence, Chengdu firemen pulled a man from the rubble of a collapsed hospital.

from the May 16, 2008 edition

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Since reporting for duty on Monday, Xiao said, he had slept for just three hours, grabbing a nap in a car. He is not alone. "None of us have slept for more than a few hours," said Sun.

Instead, he and his men have been using trained rescue dogs, microphones, miniature cameras, and reports from survivors to try to locate people still alive.

By Thursday afternoon, Sun said, they had rescued seven people at the hospital site. They had also found 13 bodies, but many more remain beneath the 30-foot pile of concrete, brick, and plaster, as the slight odor of putrefaction hanging over the site testifies.

Chinese officials warned Thursday the death toll from the earthquake could reach 50,000. The confirmed death toll was 19,509, according to China's Earthquake and Disaster Relief Headquarters. The Associated Press reported a rare government appeal to the Chinese public for donations of rescue equipment, including cranes, hammers, shovels, demolition tools, and rubber boats. Until now, China has refused all offers by international aid groups to send workers. But Thursday, it agreed to allow Japan to send a rescue team.

When the earthquake struck on Monday afternoon, Sun said, the survivor must have been in a corridor by a stairwell. When the hospital collapsed, he was trapped in a cavity beneath the stairs.

"That's why he is still alive," Sun surmised, although three people in the same cavity were dead, the survivor had said.

As the firemen dug away at the aperture they had opened, they found that the corridor had become a 15-foot deep shaft. Somehow, it seemed, the man had climbed up and found a ledge, six feet beneath the surface of the ruins.

He was standing on that ledge, exhausted and almost speechless but otherwise apparently unhurt, when a fireman reached down and secured a harness under his arms. They dragged him into the sunlight early Thursday afternoon.

Outside on the street, an ambulance had backed up to what had been the hospital's rear entrance, sirens blaring as military policemen struggled to hold back the crowd that had gathered, drawn by reports of good news.

A dozen white-coated nurses bearing first aid supplies ran in, and 10 minutes later a clump of firemen stumbled out bearing a stretcher, and a precious cargo: The survivor, a man apparently in his 40s, was wearing a dusty pair of blue pants and was wrapped in an orange fireman's jacket, his eyes masked against the daylight.

As the firemen slid the stretcher into the ambulance, the crowd broke into applause. The ambulance's rear door slammed shut, and the vehicle raced off to a hospital in the provincial capital of Chengdu, 50 miles away.

Even after so many hours, the firemen said they didn't know the survivor's name. The survivor may not have heard them, but if he did, the words of encouragement one fireman had spoken during the lengthy rescue would have been ringing in his ears: "You will have a second chance at life."

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