Written in the Spring of 2008, a few days after I covered the massive earthquake in Sichuan, China. An edited version appeared in the online magazine DART (American Photography-American Illustration Design Arts Daily.)
Like many foreign photographers, I came to China this spring mainly because of the international attention generated by the upcoming Olympic Games. But when a huge earthquake hit
Sichuan province, I found myself photographing this terrible event and dealing with challenges and dynamics I have not found in other disasters.
There are two ways to cover a logistically difficult news story like that: methodically, using carefully prepared professional resources, and then there is the way that I did it. In the first couple of days, many flights to Chengdu, the closest city to the disaster, were cancelled. Like any disaster, getting into the zone required staying flexible and aggressive. Even at the airport in Beijing, I could see that the full-time bureau chiefs had a leg up. Most were traveling with their Chinese assistants, usually slightly nerdy 20-something women carrying book bags who looked like they were headed for a college field trip.
But novices they were not. They wielded their Blackberry’s like
swordfighters,
rebooking flights on the spot and arranging on-scene drivers who would be waiting the minute they and their bosses stepped off the plane. They knew the most important areas to go and how they would get there before they’d even left the capital.
Unlike the bureau chiefs, I was working on the fly, with no assistant, no assignment and practically no language skills; just some cash, a backpack and a local cell phone filled with the numbers of Chinese friends who I would call constantly over the next several days to provide remote interpreting services with drivers.
Once in Chengdu, finding a driver that would actually take me to the scene was difficult. Many were concerned for their own families in town and were nervous about the danger of traveling into the earthquake zone. After locating one driver willing to make an exception for a generous fee, I decided to take a gamble and try to get to one of the more remote areas that had not been reported on extensively. At the end of the day, my driver and I reached a road where the bridge had collapsed, it was the end of the line for us, but I was able to spend some time photographing in the nearby fields had been turned into a makeshift army camp.
The scene was a time-warp, like something out of the American Civil War. There were thousands of soldiers and victims and tents but almost no medical supplies. I photographed in the camp for at least an hour, but when some army officials began questioning two European reporters who’d just shown up, my driver and I quietly slipped away.
The next day, I decided to travel to the city of
Dujianyan, where there had been a lot of press coverage already, but which was relatively easy to get to and had suffered significant damage. Covered bodies were still lying in the streets. One of the hospitals in the city had collapsed, and outside hundreds of people had gathered trying to get word on their relatives, some of whom worked at the facility, others who were patients. Dozens of guards blocked the entrance and with no hope of getting inside, I mingled with the crowd. Raising a tiny black point-and shoot a camera, I was able to take exactly one picture before being waved away by one of the security guards.
This turned out to be an exception. There were a few times when I was not allowed to photograph, such as when I came to mass graves, but generally, in the first few days, as rescue workers, army and others tried to get a handle on the situation, photographers were allowed to work without restriction. The disaster area was too spread out and too dynamic for officials to control. And because much of the early press coverage was focused on the speedy mobilization of the rescue and relief effort, the government probably believed its country’s image was being enhanced. Contrasts were drawn between the response in
Sichuan and that in New Orleans during Katrina.
Towards the end of the day, I came upon the scene of a multi-story apartment building which had been reduced to rubble. About ten relatives of some of those who had lived the building watched as a large scooper dug through the rubble. It seemed impossible that anyone was still alive but that did not deter one small young woman, wearing shorts and shower sandals, from periodically scrambling down in the rubble to peer through piles of debris calling out: “Ma??...
Maaa!!??” The scene was so fluid I was barely noticed. I bit my lip and focused the camera in the fading light. Her mother was found shortly before dark. The outcome was not good.
I returned to Chengdu that night, and then transmitted and crashed in the hotel room of my friend Nelson
Ching, a photographer with
Bloomberg who had nice expense-account digs at the
Sofitel. The first day had been nearly a bust, and the second, I felt like I had gotten on the scene too late. I was feeling outgunned and was ready to quit and go back to Beijing but was encouraged to stay on by my agent Marcel Saba of
Redux. Besides, a journalist friend had just told me over the phone that a town called
Beichuan was the place to go. "It's really fucked up.", he said.
The next day, after much negotiation with a driver, I rode up towards
Beichuan. Our car was stopped at a roadblock quite a ways outside of town. Only official vehicles and motorcycles were allowed through, so I got out and negotiated with a motorcyclist to give me a ride in. Arriving in the late afternoon, I was not allowed in the heart of town so I spent the night on the stands of an athletic field that had been turned into a makeshift camp for rescue workers.
At dawn, I walked down the hill into a valley and into the heart of the town. The scene was jaw-dropping. Most all of the dozens of multi-story buildings had collapsed. Even days after the disaster, there were still many uncovered bodies as workers were focused on freeing any remaining survivors.
After spending an
eerie hour wandering the town nearly alone, I came upon the scene of one such rescue. The heap from five collapsed stories of a building were on top of a man who was trapped in a space so small he could barely move. Leading the rescue was a calm, stocky, middle-aged fire caption from faraway Suzhou. His crew of about a dozen men worked, not frantically, but methodically, using gasoline powered saws and hammers, cutting away parts of
rebar and concrete, slowly enlarging the tiny hole through which the man’s cries had been heard. They'd already been working for several hours to free the man, who was awake and speaking, but his voice was getting weaker.
The effort was dangerous and extensive, all to save one man barely clinging to life, in a town where thousands had died. Occasional aftershocks would rumble underneath our feet, threatening to send enormous heaps of debris onto the rescue workers.
A young volunteer doctor from a neighboring province crawled into the tiny space where the man could be seen and inserted an IV drip in his ankle. The doctor emerged, lab coat grimy, wiped the sweat from his face, and declared the man could live for about three more hours. The fire captain nodded confidently and said he could get the man out in about an hour.
The
team had done hundreds of rescues, he said, but this was the most difficult. And because five days had passed since the quake hit, it would also probably be the last. I was able to keep track of progress because I had run into Sun, a bi-lingual newspaper photographer from Shanghai, one of the many Chinese who helped me navigate the situation.
At last the man was freed, placed on a stretcher and immediately carried away. I followed the team, photographing as they stepped gingerly across the debris, six men carrying the stretcher, one holding the IV as they tried to find footing. At one point the IV slipped out and they set the stretcher down, ironically, right next to the decaying body of someone just discovered. The IV reinserted, they picked him up again.
Suddenly there was shouting as people around us began to run. A high-ranking soldier appeared with a
walkie-talkie and began frantically waving at our group to move quickly. Sun yelled: “David, hurry! The water is coming!!”. “But my bag is back there,” I shouted , “Forget it!" he said. "We have to go!” There was word that a dam upstream had broken, and water would soon be cascading in the town.
Everyone was ordered to evacuate as fast as possible. We scrambled across the rubble and over two rickety bridges and climbed up the hill to higher ground, a process that took at least a half-hour. The man and his rescue team had made it out. Walking out, Sun and I discussed the idea that had the evacuation come five minutes earlier, the firemen would probably have been ordered to abandon their efforts, and the man, conscious and aware he was about to be rescued, would have died.
Sun found a driver to take us to his hotel
Mienyang, about an hour’s ride away. The jovial proprietor of the small hotel (average room was about $15 a night), was delighted a foreign journalist would be staying here. She began showing me dozens of photographs on the back of her digital camera, excitedly trying to explain in Mandarin that she had seen me and photographed me the day before. I was exhausted and in serious need of a shower so I tried to convey using hand gestures that she must be confusing me with some other white guy, and could I please have the key to the room.
Because my backpack was still at the rescue scene in
Beichuan, I had nothing but my cameras and the clothes on my back. I took a shower, put my filthy clothes back on and went to dinner with my two new friends from Shanghai. After returning from the restaurant, I realized I'd left a belt bag with a couple of lenses at our table. We were not even sure of the name of the restaurant, but after Sun, his reporter colleague and the hotel staff did some detective work, they figured out the name, where it was, and we went back and got my stuff, which the restaurant staff had diligently put aside.
At dawn the next morning my new companions had other plans, but they arranged for the same driver who had gotten us out of
Beichuan to take me back so I could shoot more and possibly
retreive my backpack. The man was a volunteer, a guy from a city hundreds of kilometers away who thought his pickup truck might come in handy in such a place as a disaster zone. And indeed it did. We drove back carrying a soldier, myself, and a few other vagabonds. The driver asked the soldier to escort me back in the valley, which thankfully, was not flooded. We hiked down and retraced my steps from the day before, across the same sketchy bridges and through the same ruined streets. I was looking for the precise place where I’d left my bag when I saw someone wave at me. It was the fire captain from
Suzhou I'd met from the rescue the day before. He was grinning ear to ear, and perched next to him was my trusty Arc’
Teryx backpack.
I photographed in town for the rest of the day, at one point running into New York photographer Alan Chin who was on assignment for Newsweek. An opera could be written about Alan’s attempts to care for and/or mercy-kill an injured local dog. I will spare you all the details, but some of them include a bottle of cheap and potent Chinese liquor, a sanitary napkin, profanities screamed at a nurse, and his futile search for a firearm.
Nearing day’s end, I hired a motorcycle to take me back to
Mienyang. As we rode through the mountains, getting father and farther from
Beichuan, the scenes in the villages looked a little more normal. People were still constructing make-shift shelters but there were fewer damaged buildings and farmers were working in the fields. Wind blowing through my hair, I took in the view of the mountains and green fields in the warm, late-afternoon light. It occurred to me that this was exactly the sort of scene that leads many Western tourists to travel to China to experience and photograph, and for a moment I forgot about the terrible things I’d seen in
Beichuan.
I found the same hotel from the previous night
, and after a shower, the eager
proprietor arranged a taxi to take me to a restaurant. It was one of many taxi rides in
Mienyang I would not pay for because the hotelier would explain to the drivers that I was a foreign journalist and I was doing the Chinese a service by being there, and under no circumstances should they charge me a fare.
I went back to the same restaurant but it was already closed. I found a lesser place a few doors down and as I slumped in my chair sipping tea, in walked photographer/animal
welfarist Alan Chin and his entourage, which included his assistant and friend, magazine journalist Joy
Zhao, and their driving team, a cute, soon-to-be wed couple from
Dujianyan. They were wearing matching pink t-shirts and looked to be about 16 years old. (A few weeks later in Beijing, a few of us presented Alan with a custom-engraved plastic trophy with his name in Chinese and the inscription "No. 1 Dog Rescuer").
The next morning it was time to get out of the area, transmit my pictures and plan the return to Beijing. The hotelier insisted on finding me a free ride back to Chengdu so she took me to a makeshift staging area where both volunteer and professionals drivers were picking up rides. As I got in the back of the car for the hour-long ride back to Chengdu, I met my seatmate, a neatly-dressed college-aged woman.
After we acknowledged each other with polite smiles, I began to scroll through the pictures on the back of my camera, eager to get a head start on the editing and looking forward to finishing the job and going home. At one point she glanced over to see what I was doing. I said “
Beichuan” and showed her the image on the back of the camera. “I know,” she said in halting English, “my brother and sister died there.”
She explained her siblings had been in school in
Beichuan during the quake, (most of the schools there collapsed), while she was safe at college in Chengdu. Fortunately, her parents had survived and her father had taken to the mountains in search of other relatives.
I had glanced into her eyes but completely missed any evidence of her loss. I was returning to Chengdu to get my computer and go to Starbucks where I would edit, transmit and hydrate. She was returning to school with half of her immediate family gone forever. I put my camera down and stared out the window for the rest of the trip.
A few weeks before in Beijing, a Tibetan monk had given me a small jade Buddha carving that I’d been wearing around my neck. As the young woman and I parted ways in Chengdu, I took it off and put it in her hand. It was all I could think to do.
To see more pictures of the Sichuan earthquake please click here http://davidbutow.com/pj_chinaquake.htm
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