China: Shock and Terror in the Night

The first ominous rumblings were heard in Peking at 3:40 on a rainy, windblown morning ]last week. It sounded, said a Japanese resident, "as though a UFO had whooshed its way over the city."

In Tientsin, 90 miles away, former Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam was rudely awakened in his suite on the eighth floor of his hotel, a new building of modern design, when it began shaking "like an accordion." As he and his wife Margaret hurried down the stairs to the safety of the street, the hotel began whipping back and forth, as she put it, "in a way that suggested it was deciding whether or not to topple. All of us were thinking, 'My God, this has gone on long enough!' "

For Maurice Monge, a French traveler staying in a hotel in Tangshan, the scramble to safety down heaving stairs and past crumbling masonry was an even greater nightmare: "It was horrible. We were lost, like in an ocean, an ocean in which everything was moving."

Great Losses. With such scenes of shock and terror began what could prove to be the world's worst earthquake since 1556, when a massive tremor killed more than 800,000 people in China's Shensi province. Last week the first and worst tremor reached 8.2 on the Richter scale, the most powerful recorded anywhere since 1964, when a quake registering 8.4 hit Alaska. The first tremor was followed 16 hours later by a second shock, which measured 7.9. The two quakes ripped the earth, crumpled dams and toppled buildings across one of China's most populous regions (see map), a swatch of Hopei province bordering the Gulf of Po Hai and encompassing not only Peking and its 7.5 million inhabitants but also China's third largest city, Tientsin (pop. 4.3 million), and Tangshan (pop. 1 million), an industrial and mining center. China's government publicly admitted only "great losses to the people, life and property" and turned aside foreign offers of aid, but it also rallied troops and civilian rescue teams to deal with the disaster.

Peking, where many buildings were damaged or declared unsafe, looked like a gigantic refugee center. Fearful of further shocks, millions of residents set up temporary housekeeping in parks and streets; some 3,000 foreign residents camped in the courtyards and on the tennis courts of their embassies. Cooking utensils and beds were brought out, wash lines strung from pillars to posts, and mosquito nets slung over tree branches. Some Chinese fashioned lean-tos by resting raw lumber against walls, others by cutting down tree branches; at least one family settled down for the duration in a section of a huge drainpipe.

By far the most serious devastation occurred in Tangshan, where the epicenter of the quake was located; it was described by members of a French friendship delegation visiting there as "ruined totally, 100%." The consequences for Chinese industry may be severe, since the city is both a center for the production of rail locomotives, diesel engines and other heavy machinery and the country's largest single producer of coal. Many miners, who work in shifts round the clock, were feared entombed in the deep caverns beneath the city.

Crude Forecasting. The Peking government, which made no official mention of the disaster for almost a full day after the first quake, was silent about casualties, except to say that 50 died in Peking. But Western seismologists concurred in calling the quake "cataclysmic" and "catastrophic." Robert Hamilton, of the U.S. Geological Survey, who toured the quake area in 1974, suggested that the final toll could well be "in the hundreds of thousands," considering the population density of the area, its typical mudbrick, tile-roofed buildings and the fact that the quake struck when most people were indoors asleep.

Why had there been no warning? Although scientists are learning more and more about earthquakes, which are among the most lethal of natural disasters (TIME cover, Sept. 1, 1975), prediction techniques remain fairly crude. The Chinese, who live in one of the most quake-prone areas of the world, have been experimenting with a forecasting technique that involves measurements of the level and color of well water, changes in electromagnetic currents and even erratic behavior in animals.*

Last year Chinese scientists were able to give enough warning before a quake struck Liaoning province to save thousands of lives. But this time there was no immediate warning, even though the scientists had predicted that a major quake would strike the northeastern part of the country before the 1980s. In June, Chinese geologists showed visiting American earthquake specialists evidence of ominous magnetic changes in the Tientsin area--evidence whose significance was dramatically and tragically proved last week.

* An illustrated pamphlet published in 1973 by the Earthquake Office in Tientsin advises peasants that an earthquake may be imminent:

When cattle, sheep or horses refuse to get into the corral. When rats run out from their hiding place. When chickens fly up to the trees and pigs break out from their pens. When ducks refuse to go to the water and dogs bark for no obvious reason. When snakes come out from their winter hibernation. When pigeons are frightened and will not return to their nests. When rabbits with their ears standing jump up or crash into things. When fish jump out of the water as if frightened.

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