Heaven Cracks, Earth Shakes by James Palmer

Author:James Palmer
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2011-12-16T16:00:00+00:00

Back in Beijing, the staff of the Seismological Bureau ran to work. Like most people with government positions, they had free housing near their offices. Their office was covered with shattered glass and smashed plates. Hu Keshi, still the nominal head of the Bureau, had come in as soon as he heard, but stood in a corner uselessly, ignored by the frantic scientists as a political unperson. The Bureau staff didn’t know it yet, but they’d lost colleagues in the quake; a team of four scientists sent to observe Tangshan’s seismic monitoring had been crushed in their beds. They still had no idea where the epicentre of the quake was; their communications setup was far too primitive even to pinpoint the direction. Instead, they sent four teams out by car to cover every point of the compass, interrogating stunned locals and glancing at crushed buildings to estimate where the damage was worst.

As the scientists fanned out in search of the quake’s centre, a van sped towards Beijing from Tangshan. Four men, two of them, Li Yulin and Cao Gaocheng, officials attached to the Tangshan mines, and the other two, Cui Zhiliang and Yuan Qingwu, ordinary miners, had commandeered an ambulance, determined to get word to higher authorities. After crawling out of the ruins of their living quarters near the mines, they’d headed straight for the local Party offices, only to find them annihilated. They grabbed the ambulance, and set out looking for a phone.

The ambulance sped through the streets, ignoring desperate survivors trying to flag it down, who threw bricks after the vehicle when it failed to stop. They moved in fits and starts, veering past new potholes in the roads and stopping to shift fallen trees. Searching for a phone, they tried county after county, trying large factories and government offices that might have phones. At one point they were stopped by a Party official who demanded to know their work unit, names and political status – then interrogated them about the collapsed Party offices in Tangshan, where his family lived. None of the places they stopped at had a working phone.

In Jixian county, north of Tianjin, they ran into one of the seismological teams dispatched from Beijing. They swapped people, Yuan Qingwu heading back to Tangshan with the scientists while one of them jumped into the ambulance with the miners. Eventually they came to a factory twelve miles outside Beijing, and hammered on the door, only to have the gate porter tell them, ‘You’re phoning Beijing? In the time it’ll take to put the call through, you’d be there in that ambulance of yours!’16

Flipping the siren on, they sped into Jianguomen, Beijing’s central avenue, looking for the State Council. They could see people in shock in the streets, and shaken buildings, but nothing nearly as damaged as Tangshan. As they arrived at the State Council, they told the soldiers on guard where they’d come from, and, together with two air force men who had just flown in from

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