‘We never thought it could be dangerous’
Print Edition
WANG Yongquan, his daughter in his arms, dared not look back as he ran. Behind them, a landslide was engulfing everything in its path.
“I had never run that fast before,” Wang recalled yesterday, three days after the landslide that buried an industrial park in south China’s Shenzhen.
Wang’s parents and brother-in-law are among the missing. They migrated from central China’s Henan Province to work as laborers and garbage collectors. Wang’s home was on the hillside 200 meters from where the landslide began.
Factories and residential buildings are buried under a vast stretch of featureless mud in the suburban industrial park, about one and a half hours’ drive from the airport.
Wang limped around with an injured leg to find his home using the GPS map on his smartphone. He marked the location with lime powder to help rescuers find his family members.
When the landslide happened, he was returning home from the supermarket with his 5-year-old daughter. In the distance, he caught sight of his parents and brother-in-law running from the house. It was the last time he saw them.
Wang could not get far carrying his daughter. They fell to the side and narrowly escaped the edge of the mud flow.
Around Wang, police officers, firefighters and volunteers were digging and looking for survivors. A rescuer and two dogs were taking a quick rest, having worked day and night since the disaster hit about 72 hours before.
“When we dig, we hope to find people down there; on the other hand, we wish everyone had gotten out. It’s a mixed feeling,” a rescuer surnamed Chen said. Excavators are removing the remains of larger buildings, with rescuers moving in if they detected any signs of life.
Many workers escaped the landslide as it hit on Sunday as the industrial park happened to be powered down, he added.
“We are racing against time to save life,” said Chen Lijin, who leads a police team from Beijing.
Over the past two years, Wang and his neighbors had seen trucks carrying construction waste to what used to be a quarry with a pond where people fished. “We never thought it could be dangerous,” he said.
“I still have hope,” Wang said, looking at the excavators around where his home used to be.
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