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Author Topic:   Death toll from China quake nears 10,000
Mannu
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From: always here and no where
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posted May 12, 2008 08:58 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for Mannu     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
CHENGDU, CHINA: An earthquake devastated southwestern China, killing close to 10,000 people and trapping hundreds of others under schools, factories and houses while the worst-hit area was still cut off from rescuers on Tuesday. (Watch)

The 7.8 magnitude quake, centred in Sichuan province, struck in the middle of the school day on Monday and toppled at least eight schools. Chemical-laden factories and at least one hospital collapsed, trapping hundreds more, state media said.

The death toll appeared likely to climb in China's worst earthquake for over three decades as troops struggled on foot to reach the worst-hit area of Wenchuan, some 100 km (62 miles) from the Sichuan's provincial capital Chengdu.

Officials said there was no word from three townships nearest epicentre in Wenchuan, a hilly county of 112,000 people.

About 900 teenagers were buried under a three-storey school building in the Sichuan city of Dujiangyan. Premier Wen Jiabao, who rushed there, bowed three times in grief before some of the 50 bodies already pulled out, Xinhua news agency reported.

Xinhua said at another Dujiangyan school 420 students were trapped and workers had so far been able to rescue less than 100.

"Not one minute can be wasted," Wen said. "One minute, one second could mean a child's life."

In Chengdu, many residents slept outside or in cars, fearing more tremours in the city where at least 45 people died and 600 were injured.

The government has rushed troops and medical teams to dig for survivors and treat the injured. Sometimes struggling to contain his emotions, Wen vowed to spare no effort while urging crying and injured residents to stay calm.

Severed roads and rail lines blocked the way to Wenchuan, and local officials described crumpled houses, landslides and scenes of desperation.

"We are in urgent need of tents, food, medicine and satellite communications equipment," the Communist Party chief of Wenchuan, Wang Bin said, according to Xinhua.


Townships collapse

Most farmers' homes in two townships had collapsed and there was no word from the three townships nearest the epicentre, which have a population of 24,000, the report added. So far Wenchuan has reported 15 dead, a number likely to rise steeply.

More than 7,000 may have died in Sichuan's Beichuan Qiang Autonomous County, where 80 percent of the buildings were destroyed, Sichuan television said. Beichuan has a population of 161,000, meaning about one in 10 there were killed or injured.

"Even if it means walking in, we must enter the worst-hit areas as quickly as possible," Wen said, according to Xinhua.

But a paramilitary officer marching with a hundred troops towards Wenchuan described a devastated landscape that is likely to yield many dead and to frustrate rescuers.

"I have seen many collapsed civilian houses and the rocks dropped from mountains on the roadside are everywhere," said the People's Armed Police officer Liu Zaiyuan, according to Xinhua.

Thunderstorms forecast in Sichuan for Tuesday could make rescue attempts more difficult and dislodge more loose rocks.

Most phone lines in Wenchuan were down and a website for the region's Aba prefecture said the quake had cut several major highways and communications were largely severed in 11 counties.

Landslides had cut off three major rail lines leading to Chengdu, stranding 31 passenger trains and 149 cargo trains, Xinhua said, but no casualties had been reported.

The US Geological Survey said the main quake struck at 0628 GMT at a depth of 10 km (6 miles).

Its force was felt across much of China and caused buildings to sway in Beijing and Shanghai and as far away as the Thai capital Bangkok.

Shock to region

The quake was another shock to the region already trying to cope with the devastation of a cyclone this month in Burma.

Some 1.5 million people in Burma are facing hunger and disease after the cyclone ravaged the Irrawaddy delta, leaving an official toll of 31,938 dead and 29,770 missing.

The Sichuan quake was the worst to hit China since the 1976 Tangshan tremor in northeastern China where up to 300,000 died.

This time the devastation was worst in hilly farming country, where winding roads can be hard travel even in normal times. The area is near the famed Wolong panda reserve.

The disaster has come at a bad time for China, which holds the Olympic Games in August, and has been struggling to keep a lid on unrest in ethnic Tibetan areas.

Tong Chongde, a spokesman for the massive Three Gorges Dam Project near Sichuan, said there was no damage to the structure.

In Shefang city in Sichuan, 6,000 residents were evacuated after two chemical plants were levelled, trapping more than a hundred people and spilling corrosive liquids.

In Beijing and Shanghai, office workers poured into the streets. In the capital, there was no visible damage and the showpiece Bird's Nest Olympic stadium was unscathed.

Chinese officials and scientists said that Beijing was unlikely to see more aftershocks, Xinhua reported.

In Washington, President George W Bush said the United States was ready to help. The UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon as well as Japan, France, Germany and other powers have also sent messages offering condolences and help.

But for now China is struggling to get its own rescuers where they are most needed, and one international aid expert said the death toll was likely to rise.

"Our biggest concern is children who were in schools and orphanages when the earthquake hit," said Wyndham James, the China country director for the Save the Children charity.

"I can imagine the authorities are releasing only conservative [death toll] figures that are likely to grow."

Some 61 people have been confirmed killed in northern Shaanxi, 48 in northwestern Gansu, 50 in Chongqing municipality, and one in Yunnan province, Xinhua said, citing the national headquarters of disaster relief.

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BlueRoamer
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posted May 12, 2008 10:57 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for BlueRoamer     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
I am adamantly morally opposed to earthquakes.

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Mannu
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posted May 12, 2008 11:06 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for Mannu     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote

Earthquakes are necessary - they renew the planet

by William J. Broad

They approach the topic gingerly, wary of sounding callous, aware that the geology they admire has just caused a staggering loss of life. Even so, scientists argue that in the very long view, the global process behind great earthquakes is quite advantageous for life on earth - especially human life.

Powerful jolts like the one that sent killer waves racing across the Indian Ocean on Dec. 26 are inevitable side effects of the constant recycling of planetary crust, which produces a lush, habitable planet. Some experts refer to the regular blows - hundreds a day - as the planet's heartbeat.

The advantages began billions of years ago, when this crustal recycling made the oceans and atmosphere and formed the continents. Today, it builds mountains, enriches soils, regulates the planet's temperature, concentrates gold and other rare metals and maintains the sea's chemical balance.

Plate tectonics (after the Greek word "tekton," or builder) describes the geology. The tragic downside is that waves of quakes and volcanic eruptions along plate boundaries can devastate human populations.

"It's hard to find something uplifting about 150,000 lives being lost," said Dr. Donald J. DePaolo, a geochemist at the University of California, Berkeley. "But the type of geological process that caused the earthquake and the tsunami is an essential characteristic of the earth. As far as we know, it doesn't occur on any other planetary body and has something very directly to do with the fact that the earth is a habitable planet."

Many biologists believe that the process may have even given birth to life itself.

The main benefits of plate tectonics accumulate slowly and globally over the ages. In contrast, its local upheavals can produce regional catastrophes, as the recent Indian Ocean quake made clear.

Even so, scientists say, the Dec. 26 tsunamis may prove to be an ecological boon over the decades for coastal areas hardest hit by the giant waves.

Dr. Jelle Zeilinga de Boer, a geologist at Wesleyan University who grew up in Indonesia and has studied the archipelago, says historical evidence from earlier tsunamis suggests that the huge waves can distribute rich sediments from river systems across coastal plains, making the soil richer.

"It brings fertile soils into the lowlands," he said. "In time, a more fertile jungle will develop."

Dr. de Boer, author of recent books on earthquakes and volcanoes in human history, added that great suffering from tectonic violence was usually followed by great benefits as well. "Nature is reborn with these kinds of terrible events," he said. "There are a lot of positive aspects even when we don't see them."

Plate tectonics holds that the earth's surface is made up of a dozen or so big crustal slabs that float on a sea of melted rock. Over ages, this churning sea moves the plates as well as their superimposed continents and ocean basins, tearing them apart and rearranging them like pieces of a puzzle.

The process starts as volcanic gashes spew hot rock that spreads out across the seabed. Eventually, hundreds or thousands of miles away, the cooling slab collides with other plates and sinks beneath them, plunging back into the hot earth.

The colliding plates grind past one another about as fast as fingernails grow and over time produce mountains and swarms of earthquakes as frictional stresses build and release. Meanwhile, parts of the descending plate melt and rise to form volcanoes on land.

The recent cataclysm began in a similar manner as volcanic gashes in the western depths of the Indian Ocean belched molten rock to form the India plate. Its collision with the Burma plate created the volcanoes of Sumatra as well thousands of earthquakes, including the magnitude 9.0 killer.

But despite such staggering losses of life, said Robert S. Detrick Jr., a geophysicist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, "there's no question that plate tectonics rejuvenates the planet."

Moreover, geologists say, it demonstrates the earth's uniqueness. In the decades after the discovery of plate tectonics, space probes among the 70 or so planets and moons that make up the solar system found that the process existed only on earth - as revealed by its unique mountain ranges.

In the book "Rare Earth" (Copernicus, 2000), which explored the likelihood that advanced civilizations dot the cosmos, Dr. Peter D. Ward and Dr. Donald Brownlee of the University of Washington argued in a long chapter on plate tectonics that the slow recycling of planetary crust was uncommon in the universe yet essential for the evolution of complex life.

"It maintains not just habitability but high habitability," said Dr. Ward, a paleontologist. (Dr. Brownlee is an astronomer.) Most geologists believe that the process yielded the earth's primordial ocean and atmosphere, as volcanoes spewed vast amounts of water vapor, nitrogen, carbon dioxide and other gases. Plants eventually added oxygen. Meanwhile, many biologists say, the earth's first organisms probably arose in the deep sea, along the volcanic gashes.

"On balance, it's possible that life on earth would not have originated without plate tectonics, or the atmosphere, or the oceans," said Dr. Frank Press, the lead author of "Understanding Earth" (Freeman, 2004) and a past president of the National Academy of Sciences.

The volcanoes of the recycling process make rich soil ideal for producing coffee, sugar, rubber, coconuts, palm oil, tobacco, pepper, tea and cocoa. Water streaming through gashes in the seabed concentrates copper, silver, gold and other metals into rich deposits that are often mined after plate tectonics nudges them onto dry land.

Experts say the world ocean passes through the rocky pores of the tectonic system once every million years or so, increasing nutrients in the biosphere and regulating a host of elements and compounds, including boron and calcium.

Dr. William H. Schlesinger, dean of the Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences at Duke, says one vital cycle keeps adequate amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Though carbon dioxide is thought to cause excessive greenhouse-gas warming of the planet, an appreciable level is needed to keep the planet warm enough to support life.

"Having plate tectonics complete the cycle is absolutely essential to maintaining stable climate conditions on earth," Dr. Schlesinger said. "Otherwise, all the carbon dioxide would disappear and the planet would turn into a frozen ball."

Dr. Press, who was President Jimmy Carter's science adviser, said the challenge in the coming decades would be to keep enjoying the benefits of plate tectonics while improving our ability to curb its deadly byproducts.

"We're making progress," Dr. Press said. "We can predict volcanic explosions and erect warning systems for tsunamis. We're beginning to limit the downside effects."

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Mannu
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From: always here and no where
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posted May 12, 2008 11:09 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for Mannu     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
God is not the solution - God is a problem


Why do we build buildings made of bricks and steel and so tall that if it falls it takes humans away from it?
Some day people will build lighter, sliding buildings and cope with earthquake. It has happened in Japan. In other countries its not a big problem at least now.


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BlueRoamer
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posted May 13, 2008 12:01 AM     Click Here to See the Profile for BlueRoamer     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
I am adamantly morally opposed to Mannu.

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Mannu
Knowflake

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posted May 13, 2008 09:54 AM     Click Here to See the Profile for Mannu     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
I am honored that the archers arrow is pointing to my head

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jwhop
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posted May 13, 2008 01:11 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for jwhop     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
Mannu, are you attempting to say God caused the earthquake in China?

Or, are you attempting to say God caused the Chinese to build unsafe high rise buildings?

Whatever you are saying, the people of China have my sympathy for the large loss of life there.

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ListensToTrees
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posted May 13, 2008 01:23 PM           Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote

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Mannu
Knowflake

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posted May 13, 2008 02:12 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for Mannu     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
>>>Mannu, are you attempting to say God caused the earthquake in China?

Earth is a conscious being. Very alive.
Earthquakes will continue to happen anywhere.

>>Or, are you attempting to say God caused the Chinese to build unsafe high rise buildings?

No Son of Men built those buildings without anticipation....

Son of men didn't have devices to predict earthquake to minimize deaths.

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jwhop
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From: Madeira Beach, FL USA
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posted May 13, 2008 02:49 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for jwhop     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
"Earth is a conscious being. Very alive...Mannu"

Oh, well then, if that's true then I'm prepared to call "Mother Nature" the most evil, capricious biatch in the history of life on earth.

If that's true, then "Mother Nature" is responsible for almost all life on earth which has gone extinct. Lovers of "Mother Earth" want to blame humans but it's "Mother Earth's" hands which are bloody with extinction of species.

Not to mention that it's "Mother Earth" who can't make up her mind on the best method to torture humans. First, we get the deep freeze treatment where millions die of the cold and/or starve to death. Then, "Mother Nature" gives humans a hot foot with soaring temperatures, melting ice caps, floods, coastal regions submerged and deaths from drowning and heat stroke.

Thanks for straightening me out there Mannu. Now, you should take your message to the "Mother Earth" lovers..with my comments appended.

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Mannu
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posted May 13, 2008 03:02 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for Mannu     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
>>> Now, you should take your message to the "Mother Earth" lovers

Jwhop - you are being argumentative now after drawing your own conclusions.

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juniperb
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posted May 13, 2008 03:09 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for juniperb     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
Such a tragedy on the heels of Myanmar and our own countrys loss`s in tornados and other devestating weather phenomenon

juni

------------------
~
What we do for ourselves dies with us. What we do for others and the world is immortal"~

- George Eliot

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goatgirl
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posted May 13, 2008 03:55 PM           Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
That's terrible. Does anyone know if there were aftershocks? I hope they can get rescue workers in the hardest hit areas as soon as possible. At least the government isn't refusing foreign aid.

------------------
The truth is ... everything counts. Everything. Everything we do and everything we say. Everything helps or hurts; everything adds to or takes away from someone else. ~ Countee Cullen

We are weaving character every day, and the way to weave the best character is to be kind and to be useful. Think right, act right; it is what we think and do that makes us who we are. ~ Elbert Hubbard

The simple act of caring is heroic. ~ Edward Albert

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26taurus
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posted May 13, 2008 04:26 PM           Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
Yes, I heard there was a very strong aftershock.

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Eleanore
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posted May 14, 2008 12:12 AM     Click Here to See the Profile for Eleanore     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
How devastating. Those poor people.

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NosiS
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posted May 14, 2008 12:21 AM     Click Here to See the Profile for NosiS     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote

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jwhop
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From: Madeira Beach, FL USA
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posted May 17, 2008 11:45 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for jwhop     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
China searches for survivors as quake toll nears 30,000

By Chris Buckley
Reuters
Saturday, May 17, 2008; 11:15 PM

BEICHUAN, China (Reuters) - Thousands of soldiers and families looking for missing kin streamed into one of the worst affected areas of China's massive earthquake on Sunday, as a strong new aftershock hit and the death toll neared 30,000.

Rescue workers have plucked more than 60 more survivors from the rubble following Monday's quake in the southwestern Chinese province of Sichuan, even as hopes fade for the estimated 10,000 people or so still trapped under the rubble.

The United States Geological Survey reported a tremor of 6.1 magnitude early on Sunday centered 80 km (50 miles) west of Guangyuan, the latest in a series of aftershocks to hit Sichuan.

The official Xinhua news agency said there was no immediate word of additional damage or casualties in the area.

In the provincial capital, Chengdu, some 200 km south of the new tremor's epicenter, buildings swayed and people rushed out into the streets, risking a soaking from a passing storm.

But nuclear facilities close to the affected zone, including China's chief nuclear weapons research lab, are "all in a safe and controllable state," Xinhua said.....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/17/AR2008051701139_pf.html

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jwhop
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posted May 19, 2008 11:13 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for jwhop     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
Aid Appeal As China Mourns Quake Dead
Updated:22:53, Monday May 19, 2008

China's government has appealed for international aid at the beginning of a three-day period of mourning for tens of thousands of people killed by a huge earthquake.

National outpouring of grief

The country's 1.3 billion population observed three minutes of silence exactly seven days after the tremor left an estimated 71,000 people dead or missing..............
http://news.sky.com/skynews/article/0,,30200-1316412,00.html

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Mannu
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posted May 29, 2008 11:02 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for Mannu     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote

Its Payback time to China for its agressive actions on Tibet over several decades says actress Sharon Stone

Very piscean statement that is


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