And so our hearts continue to mourn.  Please remember to pray for the grieving survivors.

This is an excerpt from an article in The Independent.

“Beichuan county in Sichuan province used to be home to 160,000 people, and most of them lived in the now-forsaken town of the same name, nestling in one of the world's most beautiful valleys. But everyone is gone, either dead or having abandoned their flattened home.

Beichuan was too close to the epicentre of this week's earthquake to stand a chance. At least 80 per cent of it is destroyed, with many thousands of bodies still buried in the rubble. It's hard to imagine this place ever functioning as a town again.

The first sighting of what used to be the town happens about two kilometres away. It now looks like a model railway village that a nasty child has melted and covered with sand. The town was built on the sides of the valley and when the earthquake struck, the buildings slid down on top of others in a sickening concertina, leaving most of the settlement collapsed at the base of the valley. One or two large, newer buildings survived but the other big buildings folded on houses and apartment blocks, leaving mountains of rubble dozens of feet high.

Every day I have reported the story of the Sichuan earthquake it has seemed impossible to imagine things getting worse. Hanwang, with its bodies lying everywhere, was grotesque. Dujiangyan, where hundreds of teenagers were dragged out dead from the mud, was nightmarish. But every day is worse than the next. No one knows what horrors await after Wenchuan, directly above the epicentre, is opened up. At this stage, there can be precious few survivors there. But Beichuan is a truly horrendous sight. The prospect of the death toll reaching beyond 50,000 looks increasingly likely.”

Here’s the link:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/beichuan-a-vision-of-hell-829301.html