Day After Earthquake, the Search for Survivors

May 13, 2008— -- Across southwest China this morning they are counting their dead, while still searching for the living, the day after a 7.9-magnitude earthquake struck Sichuan province.

Nearly 12,000 people are believed to have perished. But in the midst of so much tragedy, searchers found at least one reason for hope: a little girl was pulled out alive from the rubble of what used to be her school.

There may be thousands like her -- trapped under collapsed schools, houses, even hospitals -- waiting to be rescued.

Just hours ago, ABC's Stephanie Sy got to a village in one of the hardest hit areas near Chongqing. In Pyongpang, a rural village 230 miles from the epicenter, the earthquake hit while children were in school.

"We found a primary school that had been completely devastated," Sy said. "It was like a tornado had targeted this school building.

"They haven't experienced an earthquake in this area," Sy said. "So [the teachers] told the kids to just stay where they were, and then, as the earth started shaking more, they told the kids to run out of the class. And as the kids were running out, the school started collapsing. Four of the children were crushed beneath the rubble and died, and dozens of other kids were injured and had to be taken to the hospital. But there were many other kids that were able to escape -- they had just enough time to run out into the playground."

The two main buildings of the school were destroyed, although surrounding buildings were unharmed.

Melissa Block, co-host of NPR's "All Things Considered," was on assignment in the area when the earthquake struck in the middle of the afternoon.

"What's going on? The whole building is shaking," she said as the earthquake struck. "The whole building is shaking. My goodness. We're in the middle of an earthquake. The whole block is shaking."

It was a moment also captured in grainy images of a man riding out the quake under his desk.

"The top of the church is falling down, and all the people are running out into the street," Block said. "As we're standing here, birds are flying, and the ground is undulating under my feet. The cross on the top of the church is waving wildly, and bricks are falling off of the ceiling, of the roof."

By nightfall, China's Prime Minister Wen Jiabao was rushed to the scene, bullhorn in hand. "Hang on," he called. "The army is on the way."

An army of rescue teams and their dogs are now flooding the quake zone, which is a mountainous region best known, until today, for its huge Panda Research Center.

Through the night, it was as if the entire region was suddenly homeless.

"A lot of people choose to stay outside and they're putting their tent and blanket on the grass and they're going to spend [the night] over there," Summer Jiang, an Operation Blessing humanitarian aid worker said. "And even people are staying, like me, still [keeping] awake because it's really scary."

Jittery residents in dozens of cities slept outdoors. The aftershocks have been relentless. More than 300 have already been felt throughout the region.

"Everywhere down the street, people have come out," Block said. "Because of the earthquake, they're crowded around in the street. People came out in whatever they were wearing inside. Everybody's looking up anxiously."

The Chinese military was out in force digging for survivors and setting up shelters and portable medical facilities.

The blast that hit today was unlike anything this country has endured since a 1976 quake outside Beijing that killed more than 240,000 people.

Building construction has improved greatly since then, but not in the most rural areas, including much of the quake zone today. Engineers say that is apparently why there were so many deaths in the countryside, but in the Sichuan provincial capital of Chengdu, fewer than 100 perished.

"In this situation, the absolute worst shaking, right on top of the fault, is the foothills of the mountains," said Lucy Jones, from the U.S. Geological Survey. "And there are a lot of villages and towns with bad buildings. There are probably a lot of dead up in the mountains that may not be able to be reached for a while because there are probably landslides blocking the roads when you have such a big event.

"If you look at China, you can see that the western part of China has a lot of faults, a lot of earthquakes, very high mountains and, therefore, not such a dense population," Jones said. "The eastern part of China is much flatter and much more heavily populated, and in Sichuan, the two regimes come together. So, this is kind of the easternmost of the really big faults hitting up against the very dense distribution of people, and, as such, it's likely to be a very significant personal catastrophe."

The death toll, already horribly high, will almost certainly be much worse. The small army of search and rescuers know that time is not on their side. And the hardest hit areas are still unreachable, cut off from the outside world, blocked by damaged roads and with no means of communication.