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from Photographers Blog:
Walking with survivors: Audio slideshow
Shanghai-based photographer Nir Elias tells of his hike with survivors of the Sichuan quake.
from Photographers Blog:
Aftermath of a quake: Audio slideshow
A showcase of David's Gray images of the aftermath of the Sichuan earthquake are set to music in this audio slideshow.
from Photographers Blog:
Earthquake in China – a photographer’s view
1. Dujiangyan, 2: 30 am, May 13th.
In misty light I arrived at Chongqing Airport with my TV colleague Royston. We drove straight toward Dujiangyan, with rain spitting gloomily and the air damply hazing my breath. The city seemed as though the Big Bang had just happened, everything had stopped. The crying and sirens all around made me dizzy and I cannot really remember how I arrived at the ruins of what had once been a school, with its 900 pupils buried in the rubble. A rescue team was desperately looking for anybody still alive, while I stood on the mountain of dust and the dead, shooting pictures. The sound of the shutter seemed to me to be like death itself scratching away.
2. On the road
Go to Wenchuan.
Go to Wenchuan.
Go to the epicenter of the earthquake .
But how on earth? All roads were damaged and all gas stations controlled by troops. A 500 ml coke bottle filled with petrol was priced at 20 yuan (2.88USD) on the black market. On May 14th, I fuelled a rented motorcycle with several of these and began my long journey to Wenchuan, all off track. 10 kilometers later, I was stopped by police, so Ibegan to walk. Half way there I was offered a lift by Wang, an emergency worker, driving a bulldozer. In return I had to promise to check on his good friend Tan, the headmaster of a primary school inside Wenchuan town.
from Photographers Blog:
Earthquake in China – a view from Beijing
It happened and it just happened, quietly but tangibly ... it only lasted 5 seconds...
May 12, 2008, 2:28 pm on the button, I was stooping to pick up a gift before rushing off to visit a client with two colleagues. The sudden dizzy feeling made me mentally rebuke myself for skipping breakfast and lunch; in those 5 seconds, I swore to myself never to do it again if I had to attend a formal meeting. But of course, my expressions remained calm.
"It's an earthquake", a sharp yet clear voice from the corner of the office broke this temporary silence which instinctively ignited my relief of being faint. "Hey buddy, maybe you are not so bad", I said to myself.
So, that is how it started ... on a normal working day, it just happened.
No worries, we had already had contingency plans...
Photographers immediately rushed to the airport, we skipped the client visit and began to tackle the breaking story. From that moment, for the first time ever, the Beijing Pix Desk began running 24/7 with three editors: Grace Liang, Reinhard Krause and myself.
The first pictures of white collars wandering downstairs after escaping from a shaking Beijing office building hit the wire 10 minutes after the quake struck while we continued moving pix from around China showing general damage like burst water pipes and cracked walls.
While the mobile phones of all our local friends' and stringers' remained unreachable, the story escalated. "A middle school building collapsed in Dujiangyan, near Chengdu, burying 900; another toppled in Chongqing..." The snaps just kept coming - who knew at that time that it was just the tip of the iceberg of a much worse tragedy.
The local stringers had already headed to these two spots before I got their first SMS which had been delayed for almost 4 hours.
"Stay safe & fast ftp," I replied in hopes that a short message would move more quickly.
Shortly after 9, the first image of real damage landed on the desk - then the second, then the third, and then the fourth ... By midnight, we had already moved 40 pictures from the worst-hit areas of Mianyang and Dujiangyan, with half of them exclusive stuff. And so it continued ...
By 7 am, 61 pictures earthquake-hit Sichuan province had been sent and by 2:28 the next day, 24 hours after the shock, 100 Reuters pictures had moved to the World... And then our staff photographers also began filing from different spots.
So, that was the first day after the earthquake, then the second, then the third - it was a sleepless fortnight until the story began to quieten down a bit...
I can barely remember how many packages we moved from this terrible news story and all of them telling heart-breaking stories, "relatives mourn near the body of their dead children", "a 61-year-old survivor is rescued after being buried for 164 hours", "a girl has to have her left leg amputated to save her life"...... There were too frequent heart warming moments as people all over the nation donated money and blood to the sufferers, 66-year-old premier Wen Jibao crying while visiting the area, exhausted young soldiers resting around their camp fire...
from Photographers Blog:
Covering the quake: Audio slideshow
David Gray recounts his experience covering the earthquake that devastated Sichuan province, China.
from Our Take on Your Take:
Face to face with a survivor
Bauhaus Wang brings a human face to the devastation caused by the quake in China through his portrait of a survivor.
View this week's You Witness slideshow here.
from Photographers Blog:
Aftershocks and other earthquake experiences
May 12, 2:28 pm, almost all my Reuters Beijing colleagues saw the office TV sets shaking. Those TV sets had often shown the news but it was the first time they themselves had been the news. Within a few seconds, we realized it was an earthquake. An 8.0 magnitude earthquake had hit Sichuan province. Sichuan! My home. About ten minutes later, I was driving my car to Beijing airport. At that moment, I did not even know that there was a place on this earth called Wenchuan. Where was I going? What time could I leave? Fortunately, I was the first Reuters journalist to arrive at the airport and unfortunately I was the last to leave as I chose to fly to Chengdu and its airport was closed. I had almost no idea how serious the situation there was but wisely as it turned out took two instant DC/AC power inverters which meant I could work normally in the firs few days when the whole area was completely out of power.
2. In the field
On afternoon of May 13, after 6 hours of driving from Chongqing, the first earthquake-hit area I reached was Hanwang Town of Mianzhu. I was one of the first to arrive there. It later transpired that because the epicenter had been Wenchuan everyone assumed it would be worst hit when in fact towns in the surrounding area suffered more disastrously. It was like the end of the world with gloomy skies and soft drizzle. Terrified survivors told me Hanwang Dongqi Middle school had been horribly damaged so I headed there. It was unnaturally silent, the bodies of at least 20 students covered with plastic bags lay in a row on the ground. A mother gently removed the coverings trying to find her own child. Policemen surrounded the scene and I dared not approach but with a long lens I could see rain and tears merged on her face. Sometime later a couple found the body of their child and were just overcome with grief. I shot a single frame and went and hugged them but then an aftershock struck which made the damaged buildings 'peng peng', like the King of Terrors clamouring against which humans were just so small and weak. The rain became heavier, the mourning became louder and the sky became darker. There was a choking smell of death. I could not believe that just that morning I had been in Beijing, a city with a population of 15 million.
from Changing China:
A tale of two stadiums
This weekend, Beijing inaugurated the new Bird's Nest Stadium with the "Good Luck Beijing" track and field event. I attended less than 24 hours after covering the earthquake in Sichuan, and the contrast between sports and rubble was a little hard to digest.
The Bird's Nest stadium, built for the Olympics, can seat 91,000 fans. The air flows through well, keeping it cool in the muggy Beijing summer. The seats are well-positioned, so the contestants can be seen easily. The screens are visible, the sound-system clear, the lighting strong but not harsh.
from Changing China:
The earthquake and the Olympics
The tenor of China's Olympic year changed dramatically over the past two weeks.
What had been a building crescendo of celebration and national pride turned into an outpouring of grief and support for the earthquake-hit province of Sichuan.
Wall-to-wall television coverage of the torch relay, a blissful affair once on Chinese soil, gave way to heart-rending reports from the devastated epicentre and uplifting scenes of a nation pulling together to confront disaster.
from Changing China:
Disaster in Sichuan
I was one of the first foreign reporters on the scene after a devastating earthquake hit the southwestern Chinese province of Sichuan on May 12.
It all seemed so normal when I arrived in the provincial capital Chengdu, some 12 hours after the 7.9 magnitude tremor hit, that I thought maybe the area had got off lightly. But heading in the hard hit town of Dujiangyan, just north of Chengdu, two hours after arriving in Sichuan, I realised how bad the situation was.
