As the Search for Survivors Scales Back, an Air of Hopelessness Descends

Shiho Fukada for The New York Times
As a hospital in Shifang filled up, people injured in the earthquake had to stay in tents outside. Officials say at least 220,000 were injured in the disaster.
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ByANDREW JACOBS andEDWARD WONG
Published: May 19, 2008
BEICHUAN, China — On television, the miraculous survivor stories have begun to fade, replaced with reruns of dramatic rescues. A man who endured entombment for 148 hours in the town of Yingxiu was rescued and celebrated Sunday. Elsewhere, three people beat the odds, being found alive amid the rubble, although one of them later died in a hospital.
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Times Topics: Sichuan Earthquake
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The New York Times
Roads to Beichuan were opened over the weekend.
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A woman walks among debris in Sichuan Province on Sunday.
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Aly Song/Reuters
A coliseum in Mianyang, in Sichuan Province, houses survivors left homeless in the earthquake.
But in towns and hamlets across Sichuan Province, where thousands remain missing, an air of hopelessness began to set in. The search for survivors was scaled back in many places, and rescue workers began focusing more on the task of cremating or burying the dead.
In Beijing, officials announced a three-day mourning period during which the ceremonial relay of theOlympic torch, which has been traveling through China, would be suspended.
Nearly a week after an enormousearthquake devastated much of north-central Sichuan, officials raised the death toll to 32,476 and said at least 10,000 others were still buried and presumed dead. At least 220,000 were injured, they said. Authorities also said they were taking measures to prevent the spread of disease through contaminated water.
In one bit of good news, the threat of flooding in several areas appeared to lessen on Sunday after three rivers clogged by landslides flowed over the blockages without complication, according to Xinhua, the official news agency. On Saturday, thousands of people, survivors and rescue workers alike, fled Beichuan and other towns. By Sunday, the workers had resumed their search for victims in Beichuan, although the streets were mostly empty of survivors.
But fears of flooding remained elsewhere. Officials warned that heavy rain forecast for early in the week could weaken some of the 391 reservoirs that dot the region and threaten thousands of people downstream. Also at flooding risk, authorities said, were areas adjoining 21 rivers blocked by huge landslides.
A large aftershock, followed by a pounding rain, brought added misery early Sunday, but the sun and heat arrived with daybreak. While the good weather was welcomed, the heat also gave rise to the stench of death.
In several towns, workers cremated bodies or piled unidentified victims into mass graves, sprinkling them with lime. Families lit incense and wept in front of collapsed buildings. Emergency workers with fire hoses could be seen soaking wreckage with disinfectant.
Also on Sunday, officials from the China Seismological Bureau revised the earthquake’s magnitude to 8.0 from 7.9. According to theUnited States Geological Survey, earthquakes of that magnitude are rare, occurring on average once a year.
Over all, more than 21,000 people have been saved from the rubble, including 63 on Saturday, according to Xinhua. More than 200,000 people have been evacuated from the earthquake zone, the news agency said. In an indication of the challenges to come, government officials said they were providing 4.8 million people with temporary shelter.
With 10 million people in need of food, Prime MinisterWen Jiabao announced that Beijing would give quake survivors $42 a month for at least three months. The average monthly salary is about $50 in rural China and more than triple that in urban areas, according to the National Bureau of Statistics of China.
The government’s decree of a three-day mourning period, to start Monday, asks the public to observe three minutes of silence on the first day. Flags across the country will be flown at half staff, something often associated with the deaths of political leaders.
The decision follows a flood of Internet traffic in recent days that has called on the government to make a significant gesture to acknowledge the severity of the earthquake, China’s greatest natural disaster since 1976, when an earthquake destroyed the eastern city of Tangshan, killing at least 240,000.
Across northern Sichuan, workers continued clearing rock slides that had cut off thousands of people. Roads to Beichuan and Wenchuan, as well to a half-dozen villages, were opened over the weekend, allowing caravans of supply trucks to begin rolling in. Beichuan was still teeming with rescue workers and soldiers for much of Sunday, but it began to empty by late afternoon.
A team of rescue workers from Guizhou Province who had arrived on Friday said they had saved eight people on Sunday. Several survivors were from villages in the mountains surrounding Beichuan. Chances of survival may have been higher in the villages, where homes are generally a single story, than in Beichuan, with its tall apartment blocks and office buildings.
In the late afternoon, the team brought the eighth of the survivors, a man named Hu Mingchun, 70, down from his collapsed home on a wooden stretcher. His son had returned to Beichuan on Saturday to look for him and had found him lying among the rubble of his home.
“My feet hurt, my head hurts, it all hurts,” Mr. Hu said from the stretcher. “It was so difficult. At least now I’m able to breathe.”
A few survivors were still straggling on the outskirts of the town on Sunday afternoon. One man carried a television in a basket on his back, while another hauled a white washing machine.
At the ruins of the People’s Hospital, Japanese rescue workers used a device to probe the rubble for survivors. More than 200 search-and-rescue experts from neighboring countries have begun working alongside Chinese soldiers and emergency workers throughout Sichuan Province. Russia delivered three planeloads of supplies on Saturday, and the United States flew in 15,000 ready-to-eat meals, 655 tents and 2,600 lanterns.
But a 10-member group of British recovery experts was denied entry visas on Sunday. Chinese officials said they were worried about their safety, said Julie Ryan, a spokeswoman for the group from the International Rescue Corps. “There is so much we could have done,” she said.
Andrew Jacobs reported from Chengdu, China, and Edward Wong from Beichuan.