Scenes of tragedy as rescues dwindle and hope dries up

JUYUAN, China - Digging by hand, soldiers and rescue workers combed through the wreckage of a middle school yesterday in this small Chinese town.

When they found bodies, they carried them one by one on makeshift stretchers into a muddy school field, where families identified the lost.

It was a mournful scene that will be repeated over coming days and weeks. Officials believe the giant mound of twisted metal and concrete shards holds the remains of several hundred missing children from Monday's powerful earthquake.

Li Zhihua, a 74-year-old retiree, said her grandson had been among the 900 students buried in the wreckage and the family had gathered to help the boy's parents.

"He was everything for them," she said, wiping away a tear. "It is very hard."

For many of the grieving families, the loss of their children was particularly tragic because China's population-control policies restrict most couples to only one child.

Yang Mouyipang, a 48-year-old farmer whose niece remained missing, said he had lost hope that she remained alive.

"We are just waiting to hear something," he said as families crowded around another body and tried to identify whose child she was.

Hope has died in Juyuan and in hundreds of towns and villages throughout western China that more survivors will be found. Yesterday, China's state-run media reported that nearly 15,000 people had died and tens of thousands more were buried or missing.

The grieving, searching and disbelief in Juyuan, a town of roughly 20,000 people, were common to many communities.

"We are shell-shocked," said Zhang Yuhua, a 57-year-old cook at the middle school who had been resting in an adjacent building when the earthquake hit. "All I can think of is the students who are gone."

Sixteen-hundred students attended the Juyuan Middle School and more than 900 of them were trapped when its largest building collapsed on Monday. By yesterday evening, only three children had been found alive, Zhang said, though one of the children later died in a nearby hospital.

Zhou Jianpin, a doctor from a local hospital, has spent two days at the site of the collapsed middle school, sleeping occasionally for a few hours.

He sat with a surgical mask dangling limply around his neck. "We won't leave until the last child is found," he said.

Zhang said that she was resting in a two-story apartment building behind the school when the earthquake hit at 2:28 p.m. Her most vivid and haunting memory of that day is a student, maybe 15 years old, whose legs were trapped under a fallen concrete slab.

"She was calling for me to help her, but I couldn't lift the stone," Zhang said, her eyes welling with tears behind thick glasses. "I tried to call 911, but the phones weren't working."

By the time the police arrived some 40 minutes later, the girl had died.

Yesterday, Zhang and other residents held vigil at the school wreckage, burning candles in tribute to children who had perished.