What It’s Like To Be Buried Alive By An Earthquake

It’s a nightmare that even your wildest dreams could never conjure up. And it happened to a 37-year-old man after one of the worst earthquakes in recent memory.

Yuan Jiang is one of the lucky few who were pulled from the rubble of the temblor that’s expected to have a final death toll well above 50,000 in China. He lay in the wreckage for 72 agonizing hours, trying to survive, desperately praying someone – anyone – would find him.

Now he’s recounting what happened during those horrible three days, vividly bringing to life a living death and what it’s like to have every second filled with terror, pain and a lost sense of hope.

Yuan was at a meeting on the six floor of his office building with 20 other telecommunications specialists in the city of Beichuan when the quake hit on May 12th. As the structure shook in the 7.9 Richter wrecker, some ran for the stairwells. Others stood frozen in shock and fear.

None made it out before the collapse.

Before Yuan knew it, the wall beside him splintered and fell on top of him, trapping him from his stomach to his neck, pinning him to the floor. He was unable to move but was fortunately in such a position that he was at least able to take some painful short breaths. He lost his glasses, making things worse because he couldn’t see where he was or what had happened to him.

The rest will be forever frozen in his memory. “I shouted until I had no more strength left,” he recalls, his voice still hoarse. “I just wanted to escape.”

He also heard the agonizing screams of co-workers, trapped just as he was. Some yelled for help and he recognized their voices, responding as best he could. They discussed their injuries and worked on figuring out where each had fallen.

Slowly and frighteningly, the screams fell silent, as death robbed some of their voices and injury and exhaustion made it impossible for others to muster the strength to respond.

Hour after hour, Yuan lay there, wondering about his family and friends and whether help would ever come. He had no way of knowing his city was among the worst hit and had been completely cut off from rescue crews.

He tried to think of pleasant things during his unplanned imprisonment, working all the time to keep himself calm. “I thought about my wife, my daughter, all the people I love,” he recounts. “I thought of everything that was precious to me.”

Yuan had trouble sleeping, perhaps fearful he would not wake up. And in the midst of the silence, he heard a sound. It was his cell phone, equipped with an alarm designed to go off once a day. It was the only way he could tell that another 24 hours had passed.

Reality began mixing with necessity as the needs of his body overtook the fears of his mind. “I didn’t feel any hunger, but had a fierce thirst,” he remembers.

He heard that alarm ring three more times before shouts of rescue workers finally reached his location. The survivors – including Yuan – mustered the resolve to call back. “We were shouting ‘Save me’ with all our strength,” he relates. Two of his co-workers were found and freed.

But the rubble near him left him trapped as experts lifted off the pieces one by one to reach him. It took five more hours to finally get him out. He’d been there for more than 72 hours.

Police laid him on a stretcher, covering his eyes to protect them from the daylight he hadn’t seen in three days, and carried him several kilometres up a winding mountain path to a school, converted to a medical centre. He was finally driven by ambulance to a real hospital, where he struggled to recover.

“I was dizzy and confused,” he states. “I was hallucinating.” For the first two days, he drank only water and managed to get down a bowl of porridge after that.

But while he survived, he knows his life and that of his family will never be the same. His 10-year-old daughter and his mother escaped the carnage but he doesn’t expect to ever see his wife again. She’s believed buried under the rubble of her home and is thought to have died in the wreckage.
 
“My wife,” he notes simply, “is gone.”

Now Yuan grasps at even the semblance of a normal life and he’s one of the fortunate few. He emerged from his ordeal with just fractures to his chest, a torn left ear, a bruised right eye and a lost chunk of scalp.

He’s expected to recover physically, although his mental state may take much longer to heal. For now, he’s already getting restless and tired of being confined to a bed. “All I want to do now is sit up,” he admits. “It’s so hard just lying here all day doing nothing.”

It’s a luxury some 50,000 others will never get the chance to experience.

File photo credit: Liu Jin/AFP/Getty Images