In the wake of the big one

Local men witnessed China cope with earthquake aftermath

The phone started to ring about 2 a.m., May 12, just hours before their flight was to leave for China.

“Don’t come, there’s been a terrible earthquake,” warned friends and colleagues.

But Xiaochuan Pan and David Baker decided to go anyways. Their appointments with health ministers and officials in Chengdu hospital, about 100 kilometres from the quake’s epicentre, were already made.

“All the communications stopped,” said Pan, who lives in Saanich. “Even in Beijing we didn’t really know it was so bad (and we were) not sure the airport would be open.”

Pan, as principal of the Canadian College of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine, and Baker, chairman of the board of East-West Medicine Society, needed to finalize arrangements to send their students to Chengdu for their fifth year of study in Chinese Medicine.

Also arriving on their flight were the first wave of journalists into the area. Navigating through Chengdu, the capital city of Sichuan province, Pan and Baker saw tents filling parks and damaged buildings.

They didn’t see the worst areas. In the city’s outskirts, more than 4,000 people died, mostly from collapsing substandard apartments.

Large cracks and fallen plaster covered their own seven-storey hotel. From the fifth floor, they tried to sleep through almost hourly aftershocks that measured 5.5 and swayed the hotel from side to side.

“I’ve never felt anything like it,” said Baker, an Oak Bay resident. “When you’re lying on the bed, your whole body resonates with the earthquake.”

For most of their four days in the city, the two tried to stay out of the way of the relief effort.

“That was so frustrating because I’m a physician,” Baker said. “I could do everything except talk, and read the labels and take direction or give direction.”

In the days following their arrival, the city of almost 11 million seemed to go about its normal business, despite an undercurrent of quiet desperation. Only one incident revealed the people’s anxiety.

“We were walking along a street and there was a mild tremor and there was an immediate panic with people running in all directions,” Baker said. “It was almost out of a movie -- buildings suddenly evacuating into the street with no regard for traffic.”

After returning to Victoria on May 21, Pan says he’s glad he didn’t cancel his trip.

“I can share the emotions with the local people and I’m happy to see the changes in China towards good direction,” he says from the safety of his Chinese medicine clinic at 1620 Government St.

Media transparency was the biggest change he noticed in China. Local television was able to broadcast the rescue operations unfold. In the past, the government would downplay disasters in the state-controlled media.

Recounting the tireless work of soldiers rescuing people from the rubble, Pan held back tears describing how one old woman knelt down before a soldier to offer food. The soldier refused, unable to break away from his heart-breaking toil.

Many, carrying the injured, walked for 20-hours at a time to reach mountain villages.

Baker returned home with a message of warning for Victorians. Unlike China, which deployed 148,000 troops in 36 hours, Canada is not prepared for an earthquake of magnitude 8.0.

“When I look at what we have in the way of facilities here, it’s rather terrifying, really,” Baker said, pointing to the inadequacy of our air and defence force or our stored provisions of fresh water, dried food, blankets and tents.

“Instead, we have an education system that says be prepared,” he said. “Despite the severity of this tragedy, it’s already out of the news and it’s already out of people’s minds. People think it won’t happen to me, but I’m here to say it can happen to us.”

rholmen@saanichnews.com