Earthquake @ MindSay

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

 

I got a e-mail today from the parents of a great friend of mine. It made my heart and soul hurt. It informed me that my friend and her 8 yr. old daughter didn't survive the horrific earthquake in China. The worst in 3 decades.

I really don't know why I'm posting this. I'm not looking for comfort, I am quite calm with death in fact. But, of course I am sad and frustrated. I guess, if anything, I just wanted to ask that you please take a moment of silence in your busy lives for my friend. She was doing what she always wanted though. Teaching young children English.

Thanks, and as always, peace.

So the whole politics thing didn't really work out too well because by the time I started posting them all but five or six of the primary's/caucuses were already over... So I'm going to take a different path.

I would like to start out by sending out my deepest condolences to Myanmar and China.

As most of you already know, Myanmar was hit with a terrible cyclone just over 2 weeks ago, killing 34,273 and counting. The unfortunate part of the Myanmar cyclone, the part that hits hard, is the United Nation's estimate thar up to 40% of those who were killed in the cyclone were children.

Another thing that most of you already know, China was hit with a 7.9 earthquake, just a day ago, killing 10,000 and nearly 10,000 remain missing.

I can't even begin to imagine such disasters hitting home. Even Hurricanes Katrina, not to trivialize this tragic event, only had 1,500 deaths, which fail in comparison to the estimated 45,000 already dead between these two horrifying disasters.

I know that if something like this does happen close to home, as a EMT, that I will have a lot of wonderful people responding and working there asses off to find every last trapped person. I know that there are tons of people out there much like myself who have continued their education, by getting disaster response training. A little price to pay to be able to save thousands of people, hundreds of people, tens of people, or maybe just one person, but who knows who that person could be, it could be you.

I pray to all of you to follow in my and many others footsteps by getting disaster responses training. There is a some time and effort put into the training but its worth it even if all you save is one life.

I haven't seen this on any of the news programs, but this Sichuan University student posted his video from a classroom (or dorm?) on the campus which is about 30 miles from the epicenter :

            Please pray for those who have lost friends, children, relatives and loved ones in the earthquake in China's Sichuan province.