Feeling the earth move

I can't say that I did. Thanks, anyway, to those of my correspondents who expressed concern about my well-being.

Apparently, Monday's earthquake was felt quite strongly in tall buildings, and most of the office blocks around town were evacuated as a precaution. At ground level, I don't think anything was perceptible. I think I was in a taxi at the time, and quite oblivious.

The first I heard of it was a little while later - late afternoon - when a couple of Chinese friends sent me warning text messages about it.

It was interesting to see how the news got out and how quickly it travelled. I imagine the authorities here might have been inclined to sit on the news for a while until they'd had time to digest its magnitude and plan when and how to release the story (progress of a sort: not so long ago, the debate might have been about whether to release it at all). However, their hand was forced, as the news broke very rapidly without them.

The first reports outside of the country seem to have been based on seismic analysis from the United States (and maybe other countries too) identifying western Sichuan as the epicentre of a massive quake. However, the news got around very quickly in China as well - chiefly, I understand, through the numerous Chinese clones of the Twitter website (which is, I gather, a sort of communal online bulletin board, an outlet for the instant messaging urge when you have no friends to send messages to). That, of course, soon spilled over into people sharing the news with each other via e-mail, SMS, and phone calls. Ah, the power of the information revolution!

Also, of course, the quake was so powerful that it was directly felt across most of China (just not by me).

Later on that evening, a couple of other Chinese friends told me - entirely independently of each other - that they had been told, quite authoritatively, that there would be a major aftershock early on Tuesday morning, and suggested maybe I shouldn't go to bed that night as a precaution. Ah, the power of rumour and superstition! I've heard this kind of warning before - after a typhoon, after the earthquake in Xinjiang a while back, after the Songhua River chemical spill a few years ago. Always the predicted hour of doom seems to be 4am (or between 3am and 4am - the fourth hour). I suppose, as long as the fear doesn't become too potent, there's no real harm in maintaining a heightened alertness for a little while, in taking a few steps towards disaster-preparedness. The key - and not unreasonable - anxiety of many Chinese, I believe, is that such events may cause an interruption in their utilities; on Monday night, all across the country, a lot of people were probably stocking up on flashlights and candles, and filling every container in their house with tap water. Me - I was just propping up a bar, watching CNN (without the sound) to try to find out more about what had happened.

I assume this paranoia about disaster striking in the wee small hours has to do with the numerological juju about '4' being an ill-omened number because it sounds like the word for 'death'; but it may possibly also have to do with lingering memories of some historic disaster. I believe the hugely destructive Tangshan earthquake of 1976 hit in the early hours of the morning, and that was surely an important factor in the enormous loss of life it caused; I get the impression that this new Sichuan earthquake has been almost as severe in the amount of damage it has caused, but if the death toll remains in the 10s rather than the 100s of thousands (let us hope for what we can: it's still early to be estimating the total loss of life, but it's looking very, very bad), I suspect that this will be largely because it happened in the middle of the afternoon when so many people were out of doors, rather than asleep in their beds.

Another question that's been intriguing me is how fast does a seismic shockwave travel? Can anyone point me to a definitive answer on that? I gather the earthquake epicentre was some 1,300 miles or so from Beijing, and I think we felt the initial tremor about two hours later (the numerous powerful aftershocks - which apparently gave the impression in some areas of the earthquake being almost continuous for more than two hours - were not strong enough to be felt this far away).

One of the colleges I visited in my job with the English education company last year is situated a few miles to the north and west of Chengdu, not too far from the epicentre. I hope the staff and students I met there are all OK; you do feel the impact of a disaster like this all the more keenly when there's a personal connection like this, however tenuous it may be.

A lot of my journalist friends have headed out there to cover the story, although I'm not sure what kind of access they'll get. Many of the worst affected areas lie in the western half of the province, the heavily Tibetan portion that's been closed off to foreigners for the past two months. At least there may now be one inadvertently positive outcome from the recent military crackdown: there are huge numbers of soldiers already on hand to help with the relief effort.

I had been thinking of heading out there myself to volunteer to help with the search for survivors. I'm not even sure if that's possible; and I rather suspect that a huge influx of foreigners at the moment - however well-intentioned - wouldn't be welcomed, and perhaps would not be helpful. I pray they are getting enough manpower mobilised on this, though: there are whole villages, towns, cities buried; I saw a report yesterday of a single small city where they believe there are as many as 18,000 people trapped in the rubble; and that's only one among many. This is an unhappy week.