THE walkie-talkie was silent for several minutes, except for warnings about falling stones and possible landslides.

Army rescue worker Liao Yang still has no orders to move uphill on the mountain road 1,300 meters above sea level on Duanshiya or Broken Stone Cliff. Sitting on his knapsack and leaning against a rock-breaking equipment, Liao lights a cigarette.

"I have never seen a dead body," says the 20-year-old, who is completing his second year in China's Army Corps of Engineers. He and his team of six other men are engaged in rescue work from the magnitude-7 earthquake that struck Lushan County in Sichuan Province on April 20. At least 193 people died and 11,211 injured.

Around 100 meters above Liao, 47-year-old villager Li Anquan was buried in a landslide.

It won't be long before Liao sees his first dead body.

Liao, his teammates and a sniffer dog named Thunder have been waiting for an excavating machine to clear away rubble so Li can be located. It's been four days since Li was buried - people figured that out when they found his crushed motorcycle on the road.

Thunder, the dog, bought from Germany when it was a puppy, is tired from days of sniffing and searching for bodies. His career has spanned six or seven years of hunting for human life and human remains.

He needs a rest, says his handler. "His nose will lose sensitivity after continuous work."

Liao and his team in orange overalls and helmets are part of the Yunnan Earthquake Rescue Team, a group of 100 soldiers who joined the search since Day One.

Battalion commander Kang Zhuo says half of his men were ordered down the mountain to check on damaged buildings in a village - they specialize in hazardous city and town search and rescue where unsafe buildings are always a threat. It was filled with ruins and rubble.

The Yunnan contingent is a crucial part of a vast national rescue team, which also was deployed after the devastating 8.0-magnitude Wenchuan earthquake on May 12, 2008, that left at least 87,000 people dead or missing.

Kang calls that experience "a real and tough test." For three days into the rescue, his men had little to eat. The scenes are still vivid in his mind.

"Bodies were scattered all around," says Kang, who has served in the army for 12 years and just returned from a nine-mouth tour as a UN peacekeeper in Lebanon. He had never counted so many corpses as in Wenchuan.

He recalls that his men had to crawl into ruins for search and rescue, mainly in Beichuan, one of the hardest-hit towns. At the same time they had to beware of aftershocks that could bury the rescuers themselves. No one was injured.

The team established in 2003 responds to major earthquakes and landslides in earthquake-prone areas, including Qinghai Province's 7.1-magnitude earthquake in Yushu in 2010 and Yunnan's 5.7-magnitude quake in Yiliang last year.

Back in 2008 in Sichuan's Beichuan, they found a man more than 150 hours after he was buried. They also saved Li Yue, an 11-year-old girl who lost her left leg but told the rescuers that she wanted to become a ballet dancer. She had been buried in the ruins of a collapsed school.

The "ballet girl," who became famous nationwide, later visited the team in Kunming, Yunnan Province, to thank them for her life. They gripped her hands and told her to just move on with life, like the others whose lives have been forever changed by natural disasters.

Experiencing death up close was new for young rescuers such as Liao.

A sad discovery

There was, however, no miracle rescue of farmer Li who was swallowed by a landslide following the earthquake.

At 1:30pm on April 25, the operator of the excavating equipment saw one of Li's hands thrust out from the mud. Li's two adult sons desperately dug with their bare hands and had to be pulled away by soldiers.

Soldiers and other rescuers covered Li's body and placed it on a bamboo stretcher.

A crowd then carried the stretcher on another mountain path toward the cemetery where a black coffin had already been prepared.

"Now he can be reunited with my mother," said one of Li's sons, adding that their mother died more than 10 years ago. After kneeling to thank the soldiers who did their best, the sons escorted their father on his last earthly journey to a final, peaceful resting place.

As the family burned paper money to finance Li in the afterlife, the rescue troops began to pack and pull out.

There were lessons to be learned. Around 60 rescuers were flown to the quake area on the afternoon after the disaster, but their convoy got stuck along congested country roads partly destroyed by giant boulders in the landslide. Crushed vehicles blocked their way as well.

Because of the landslide, they had to leave some of their heavy equipment, such as rock breakers and forcible entry tools, and proceed on foot with lighter equipment, such as life detectors. They had to leave their tents behind.

Only on the fourth day after the quake was it possible to clear the way and dispatch the excavator.

"I do what the army teaches me to do, and I'm still learning," says Liao who plans to sign a three-year contract with the corps after his first two-year term ends.

Apart from basic military training, the team gets earthquake search and rescue training every week.

The team has been expanded to around 300 members and equipped with the latest imported rescue gear. Commander Kang says he's proud of the team's improvement and professional rescue skills.

The team sometimes trains paramilitary soldiers from earthquake-prone areas so that they can respond quickly when natural disaster strikes.

After the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake, China quickly started to develop and produce professional rescue equipment, but it still lags behind other countries.

Better equipment needed

Wang Jianping, a technician with the National Earthquake Response Support Service, says the biggest issue for China is a "lack of national quality standards" for earthquake rescue equipment.

"Safety can scarcely be ensured since there's no strict threshold," says Wang.

Upgraded technology is required, such as improved seals for hydraulic equipment, and manufacturing needs improvement, he says. Today equipment is produced in small quantities and the cost is high. "We have a long way to go," he says.

For the first time in the Lushan County quake, two domestically made robots were deployed, one for search and one for life detection. A small, unmanned rotor craft or drone was deployed to photograph the damage and terrain and to help police direct traffic away from landslides on roads. The China Earthquake Administration said the aim was to evaluate the reliability of the technology and assess how they could be integrated with human rescue work.

The team was helping to build portable wooden houses for temporary shelter for survivors who were living in tents. Students were returning to school in temporary structures.

"It won't take long before I can go home," says Kang.