A Tourist

filmed the earthquake as it happened:



A big challenge now is to stem the damage to the dams.

The WSWS looks at the tragedy from its perspective:

Although the earthquake is a natural disaster, the extent of the destruction and death has exposed the monstrous reality of an irrational social order that puts private profit ahead of the safety and well being of people. Anger is mounting at the shoddy character of the buildings in the impoverished towns and villages and the stark inequality between rich and poor.

Sichuan Earthquake.

The death toll from Monday's devastating earthquake in China could rise to 50,000, government officials are now saying.

I'd bet that's a conservative estimate.

Sichuan Earthquake.

The death toll continues to mount in China following Monday's earthquake, with some of the more devastated areas not even reporting their casualties yet.

This is interesting to note:

On May 13 Newsweek spoke to Weimin Dong of Risk Management Solutions, a firm that specializes in assessing financial risks due to physical catastrophes like storms and earthquakes. He noted that the current earthquake’s intensity—a measure of how far the ground moves from its original position during the earthquake—was over 9, whereas Chinese building codes require that buildings be able to survive an earthquake of intensity 7.

Asked why the requirements were set so low, Dong said: “You cannot require all of the buildings designed to [be fully equipped], because it costs a lot. You have to have larger beam sizes and everything else, so it’s a cost consideration. [...] It’s not like in Beijing or Shanghai—there they just pull down the old building and build a new high-rise. But in the rural areas, the larger buildings are the older buildings.

“From the pictures of the schools, it seems like there was some kind of reinforcement, but it [was] not well designed [and] it doesn’t seem like the building design considered the impact of earthquakes at all.”

As I said before, what's a few hundred thousand (or even a few million) dead Chinese anyway? There are a lot more from where they came from, so corporations dependent on slave labor won't be hurting.

The death toll has officially risen to 15,000. Nearly 60,000 people are missing near the epicenter of the quake. Rescuers have their work cut out for them as they reach the epicenter.

I wouldn't be surprised if the total dead ultimately tops 100,000.

Now officials are worried about cracks in a dam as a result of the earthquake.

Sichuan Earthquake II.

So far 12,000 fatalities have been reported for this earthquake, but another 18,000 are buried under rubble in a single city.

This is an earlier report:



A seismologist predicted five years ago Sichuan would have a major earthquake.

Citizen journalists were out and about recording the earthquake and its aftermath.

Bloggers are hard at work writing about the earthquake, and there are a few peddling conspiracy theories.

Sichuan Earthquake.

Almost 12,000 people have been reported dead and tens of thousands more are still buried under rubble as a result of yesterday's massive earthquake in China.

Now the death toll has exceed 12,000.

In the WSWS's eyes, foreign countries which have profited immensely from the exploitation of Chinese labor can rest easy knowing the earthquake happened in a less-populated, less-industrialized area of China.

According to their article, China still has a long way to go to make improvements in combating the worst in earthquakes:

The lack of government control over many economic sectors has significantly weakened its ability to coordinate disaster relief. Furthermore, while infrastructure for foreign investors is world class, transport, communications and other services in more backward provinces such as Sichuan is poor.

Sichuan is located at the fringes of the Qinghai-Tibet plateau—a zone particularly prone to earthquakes. It is already clear from the extensive damage, particularly in rural areas, that most buildings were not constructed to withstand tremors. A design code to take earthquakes into account was only instituted after the Tangshan disaster in 1976, and many buildings in Sichuan simply did not meet even its minimal requirements. Building codes are openly flouted by developers determined to maximise profits.

If this is the case, we can expect tens of thousands more deaths.

How does this affect the economy there?

Toyota Motor Corp and other Japanese companies have suspended operations in Sichuan. A Toyota joint venture manufacturing small buses and sports utility vehicles in Chengdu has been shut down too. The venture, Sichuan Faw Toyota Motor, produces 13,000 vehicles a year and has 1,600 employees.

Trading in 66 listed companies based in southwestern China was suspended from Tuesday. In a quick assessment, overseas economists were split on the impact of the natural disaster on China's macro economy.

Merrill Lynch analysts T J Bond and Ting Lu said in a written statement, "We think the earthquake today should have much smaller impact on China's macro economy than the snowstorm in January-February, especially regarding CPI [consumer price index] inflation, industrial production and exports. We thus conclude that the earthquake is unlikely to have significant impact on current macro policies."

Thank God for that. What's a few hundred thousand deaths anyway if the economy isn't hurt badly?

More China Earthquake.

There is no hope at all for the hundreds of children buried in a school which collapsed as a result of yesterday's earthquake.

For Chinese immigrants, they are closely following events in China.

Earthquake News.

The death toll from the China earthquake, which was 7.9 on the Richter scale, has now topped 10,000, the worst death toll in that country from a quake in three decades. This is even stronger than the 1976 quake in Tangshan, which officially had a death toll of over 200,000 people (though some death toll estimates were triple that).

I am sure there will be far more fatalities than this:

The destruction of a single steam turbine factory in the city of Mianzhu buried “several thousand” people, the state-run Xinhua News Agency reported Tuesday morning.

The quake was already China’s biggest natural disaster since another earthquake leveled the city of Tangshan in eastern China in 1976, leaving 240,000 people dead and posing a severe challenge to the ruling Communist Party, which initially tried to cover up the catastrophe.

So what caused this massive earthquake? Blame it on India, which was once a giant island, moving in the direction of China. That is how the Himalayas came about.

A video report is here.

Here is another:



Brian Williams does a good job of showing just how powerful this quake was.

This interview explains why this quake is so devastating:



China has made great improvements since the last devastating earthquake in 1976, but it is still hard to predict the casualties from this latest disaster.

Here is a list of nine killer quakes. Included are the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 and the 1970 Peruvian earthquake, which caused a massive avalanche which totally destroyed the town of Yungay (I have written about this in an earlier post).

Earthquake News.

First Burma, with as many as a million and a half dead from the cyclone and its aftermath of disease and starvation, and now China.

China has perhaps the most deadly earthquakes in the world. Literally millions have died there in earthquakes since recorded history's worst, in 1556, when an estimated 850,000 people died.

Perhaps 5,000 have died from this latest one in one county. More than 900 students are trapped in a single school when it collapsed. The tremors were felt as far away as Thailand and Vietnam. Who knows how many more have died?

The worst one in China in modern times was the 1976 Tangshan earthquake where an estimated 240,000 people died (although some estimates have up to 600,000). That quake registered at a 7.8. The death toll, as the article notes, was covered up for a time by the Chinese government.

This one has been registered at a 7.8 on the Richter scale. Eighty percent of the buildings in Beichuan County have been leveled.
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Update: This earthquake's power is about on the level with the Tangshan earthquake. The death toll has been upped to 7,600. I'd say that's probably conservative, though perhaps not as severe as the 1976 quake in terms of lives lost. This one happened in the afternoon, not at night. The shock could be felt as far away as Beijing, 960 miles away.
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Update II: The death toll has risen to 8,500.
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