3,000 to 5,000 People Dead in Western China Earthquake

[Mercy Now]

And eastward it moves as foreseen by some. What is the mind pattern of this area?

[Richard]

Death toll in China earthquake rises to 7,600

By CHRISTOPHER BODEEN, Associated Press Writer
18 minutes ago

A massive earthquake struck central China on Monday, killing more than 7,600 people and trapping nearly 900 students under the rubble of their school, state media reported.

The official Xinhua News Agency said 80 percent of the buildings had collapsed in Beichuan county in Sichuan province after the 7.8-magnitude quake, raising fears the overall death toll could increase sharply.

Xinhua cited the Sichuan provincial government as saying 7,651 people died, but the situation in at least two counties remain unclear.

The earthquake sent thousands of people rushing out of buildings and into the streets hundreds of miles away in Beijing and Shanghai. The temblor was felt as far away as Pakistan, Vietnam and Thailand.

Rescuers had recovered at least 50 bodies from the debris of the school building in Juyuan township, about 60 miles from the epicenter. Xinhua did not say if any students had been pulled out alive.

An unknown number of students also were reported buried after buildings collapsed at five other schools in Deyang city in Sichuan, Xinhua reported.

It said its reporters saw buried teenagers struggling to break loose from underneath the rubble of the three-story building in Juyuan "while others were crying out for help."

Two girls were quoted by Xinhua as saying they escaped because they had "run faster than others."

The earthquake hit less than three months before the start of the Beijing Summer Olympics, when China hopes to use to showcase its rise in the world.

Shanghai's main index inched up Monday, but the advance was capped by worries over inflation and potential damage from the earthquake. Analysts said that shares of companies located in the Sichuan region may fall in coming sessions due to the quake.

It struck about 60 miles northwest of Chengdu in the middle of the afternoon when classrooms and office towers were full. There were several smaller aftershocks, the U.S. Geological Survey said on its Web site.

Calls into the city did not go through as panicked residents quickly overloaded the telephone system. The quake affected telephone and power networks, and even state media appeared to have few details of the disaster.

"In Chengdu, mobile telecommunication convertors have experienced jams and thousands of servers were out of service," said Sha Yuejia, deputy chief executive officer of China Mobile.

Although it was difficult to telephone Chengdu, an Israeli student, Ronen Medzini, sent a text message to The Associated Press saying there were power and water outages there.

"Traffic jams, no running water, power outs, everyone sitting in the streets, patients evacuated from hospitals sitting outside and waiting," he said.

Xinhua said an underground water pipe ruptured near the city's southern railway station, flooding a main thoroughfare. Reporters saw buildings with cracks in their walls but no collapses, Xinhua said.

The earthquake also rattled buildings in Beijing, some 930 miles to the north, less than three months before the Chinese capital was expected to be full of hundreds of thousands of foreign visitors for the Summer Olympics.

Many Beijing office towers were evacuated, including the building housing the media offices for the organizers of the Olympics, which start in August. None of the Olympic venues was damaged.

"I've lived in Taipei and California and I've been through quakes before. This is the most I've ever felt," said James McGregor, a business consultant who was inside the LG Towers in Beijing's business district. "The floor was moving underneath me."

In Fuyang, 660 miles to the east, chandeliers in the lobby of the Buckingham Palace Hotel swayed. "We've never felt anything like this our whole lives," said a hotel employee surnamed Zhu.

Patients at the Fuyang People's No. 1 Hospital were evacuated. An hour after the quake, a half-dozen patients in blue-striped pajamas stood outside the hospital. One was laying on a hospital bed in the parking lot.

Skyscrapers in Shanghai swayed and most office occupants went rushing into the streets.

In the Taiwanese capital of Taipei, 100 miles off the southeastern Chinese coast, buildings swayed when the quake hit. There were no immediate reports of injuries or damage.

The quake was felt as far away as the Vietnamese capital of Hanoi, where some people hurried out of swaying office buildings and into the streets downtown. A building in the Thai capital of Bangkok also was evacuated after the quake was felt there.

A magnitude 7.8 earthquake is considered a major event, capable of causing widespread damage and injuries in populated areas.

The last serious earthquake in China was in 2003, when a 6.8-magnitude quake killed 268 people in Bachu county in the west of Xinjiang.

China's deadliest earthquake in modern history struck the northeastern city of Tangshan on July 28, 1976, killing 240,000 people.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080512/ap_o...ABhB2s0NUE

[Astrojewels]

The mind pattern is straightforward in such a country, what would you say MN? China is very independent and the mind pattern of the collective is self-image, we will see that with the Olympics, there will be no comparison. The link between these two neighboring countries that have just experienced a disaster is that china will need no help, and the citizens will not be seen as victims, but both countries are ruled with strict control, so what is the difference?. This disaster will also have a short life in the news headlines, because it will be dealt with so quickly.

[GertrudaRose]

Does this earthquake seem unnaturally huge?  I did a quick search and it seems to have severely damaged an area the size of half the U.S.

[Astrojewels]

I have only seen it on the news and it does not seem to cover that big of an area.

[eMERGe]

I read that if a quake of that magnitude struck the geographic center of the United States it would have been felt from Maine to Arizona

[Sily]

Water in a pond disappears. Thousands of toads on the streets. Zebras banging their heads against a door at the zoo in Wuhan. Elephants swinging their trunks wildly, 20 lions and tigers, which normally would be asleep at midday, were walking around. Five minutes before the quake hit, dozens of peacocks started screeching.


Link to original story.

Chinese wonder if animals can predict earthquakes

By HENRY SANDERSON – 14 hours ago

BEIJING (AP) — First, the water level in a pond inexplicably plunged. Then, thousands of toads appeared on streets in a nearby province. Finally, just hours before China's worst earthquake in three decades, animals at a local zoo began acting strangely.

As bodies are pulled from the wreckage of Monday's quake, Chinese online chat rooms and blogs are buzzing with a question: Why didn't these natural signs alert the government that a disaster was coming?

"If the seismological bureau were professional enough they could have predicted the earthquake ten days earlier, when several thousand cubic meters of water disappeared within an hour in Hubei, but the bureau there dismissed it," one commentator wrote.

In fact, seismologists say, it is nearly impossible to predict when and where an earthquake will strike.

Several countries, including China, have sought to use changes in nature — mostly animal behavior — as an early warning sign. But so far, no reliable way has been found to use animals to predict earthquakes, said Roger Musson, a seismologist with the British Geological Survey.

But that has not stopped a torrent of online discussion. Even the mainstream media has chimed in, with an article in Tuesday's China Daily newspaper questioning why the government did not predict the earthquake.

Online commentators say the first sign came about three weeks ago, when large amounts of water suddenly disappeared from a pond in Enshi city in Hubei province, around 350 miles east of the epicenter, according to media reports.

Then, three days before the earthquake, thousands of toads roamed the streets of Mianzhu, a hard-hit city where at least 2,000 people have been reported killed.

Mianzhu residents feared the toads were a sign of an approaching natural disaster, but a local forestry bureau official said it was normal, the Huaxi Metropolitan newspaper reported May 10, two days before the earthquake.

The day of the earthquake, zebras were banging their heads against a door at the zoo in Wuhan, more than 600 miles east of the epicenter, according to the Wuhan Evening Paper.

Elephants swung their trunks wildly, almost hitting a staff member. The 20 lions and tigers, which normally would be asleep at midday, were walking around. Five minutes before the quake hit, dozens of peacocks started screeching.

There are a few possible reasons for such behavior, said Musson, the seismologist. The most likely is that the movement of underground rocks before an earthquake generates an electrical signal that some animals can perceive. Another theory holds that other animals can sense weak shocks before an earthquake that are imperceptible to humans.

Zhang Xiaodong, a researcher at the China Seismological Bureau, said his agency has used natural activity to predict earthquakes 20 times in the past 20 years, but that still represents a small proportion of China's earthquakes.

"The problem now is this kind of relationship is still quite vague," he said.

In winter 1975, Chinese officials ordered the evacuation of the city of Haicheng in northeastern Liaoning province the day before a 7.3 magnitude earthquake, based on reports of unusual animal behavior and changes in ground water levels. Still, more than 2,000 people died. Strange environmental phenomena including changes in well water levels, were also reported a year later before a 7.6 magnitude earthquake in Tangshan in northeastern China that killed 240,000, Musson said.

A team of Chinese seismologists was sent to the region but didn't find any evidence to suggest an earthquake. As the seismologists were going home, they stopped for the night in Tangshan and were killed in the quake.

[Richard]

Pandas Sensed China Quake Coming?

Christine Dell'Amore
National Geographic News

May 15, 2008

In the minutes before a massive earthquake shook central China on Monday, captive pandas near the epicenter began acting strangely, according to an eyewitness account released today. (Watch video.)

The observation, made by a British tourist who had been watching the pandas at the famous Wolong National Nature Reserve near Chengdu, mirrors previous accounts of animals "sensing" disasters before they occur.

Diane Etkins told the Associated Press that the pandas "had been really lazy and just eaten a little bit of bamboo, and all of a sudden they were parading around their pen.

"Looking back they must have sensed something was wrong."

(Read: "Can Animals Sense Earthquakes?" [November 11, 2003].)

Etkins and 30 other Britons were evacuated to the provincial capital of Chengdu after the magnitude 7.9 earthquake devastated the remote mountainous region, toppling towns and killing more than 19,000 people.

Twelve Americans, part of a tour of China sponsored by the conservation group WWF, were also visiting the breeding center when the earthquake hit. All of the tourists survived the quake, WWF confirmed to National Geographic News on Wednesday.

"It certainly was a surreal experience going through a 7.9 … earthquake surrounded by 25 pandas all sort of reacting to that as well," one of the Americans, Robert Liptak, told the Associated Press.

The 86 captive adult pandas were unharmed by the disaster, and an unknown number of cubs were moved to a safer location in Shawan, a main town in Wolong.

Odd Behavior

Accounts abound of both domesticated and wild animals behaving oddly before major natural disasters.

In 2005, elephants screamed and ran for cover and zoo animals rushed into their shelters before a tsunami struck Sri Lanka and India.

The giant waves killed more 150,000 people in a dozen countries, yet few animals were reported dead—suggesting that the animals reacted early to the impending disaster, experts said.

Animals have extraordinary sensory perceptions that exceed those of humans, said Diana Reiss, a professor at Hunter College in New York who studies animal cognition.

For instance, many animals can see and hear beyond human capabilities. Snakes can feel seismic waves from their burrowing prey. And some scientists have found that elephants may even be able to "hear" through their feet, Reiss said.

Many of these highly developed senses developed as survival tools in the wild, Reiss said.

"It would be important for animals to use as many cues in the environment as possible to predict an impending disaster," she told National Geographic News.

However, Reiss warned about reading too much into the apparent strange behavior of the Wolong pandas.

"These are interesting observations, but to really determine whether they are responding to something seismic … we would have to know more about what their normal behavior is," she added.

Marc Brody, president of the U.S.-China Environmental Fund (USCEF), works on panda conservation.

"I would think that animals certainly have a stronger sense of perception than humans in terms of their natural environment," he said. "When I think of a panda and their four broad feet on the ground, one would think they feel tremors before we do."

Brody, who has received funding from the National Geographic Society, added that animals' general ability to hear at different sonic wavelengths may attribute to their early warning systems. (The National Geographic Society owns National Geographic News.)

Sybille Klenzendorf, director of species conservation for WWF, said "it's not an uncommon phenomenon for animals to get nervous when big storms or tsunamis come."

The Chinese earthquake is the "same sort of thing. [Animals feel] changes in the environment—vibrations that we don't feel."

Animals such as pandas are "more in tune with their sixth sense"—an ability humans probably had in the past, Klenzendorf said. "But we've lost that kind of sensitivity," she added.

Wild Pandas

The famed Wolong National Nature Reserve, which stretches for 772 square miles (2,000 square kilometers) across rugged mountain terrain of central China, includes the largest population of captive giant pandas in the world. (See photos of the Wolong pandas.)

More than 1,590 wild pandas also inhabit the reserve, and their fate is still unknown, China's state-run media agency, Xinhua, reported Thursday.

But USCEF's Brody said that those animals are likely unhurt in their native habitat.

Suzanne Braden, director of U.S.-based Pandas International, told the Associated Press on Monday that the wild pandas were probably fine.

"The wild pandas, they can sense things," she said.

"I'm sure they moved to higher terrain. But captive pandas do not have that luxury."

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/...quake.html

[Richard]

Earthquake cloud, Chinese photographer catch prediction 2 days before earthquake occurred.

http://pinewooddesign.co.uk/2008/05/12/e...rediction/

[Astrojewels]

Not sure if those clouds are anything, but surely those frogs area sign that something is about to happen, like a horse before a storm.