By Tham Choy Lin, IANS,
Chengdu : A hush fell across China at 2.28pm Monday and then sirens wailed, marking the exact moment a week ago when the nation was shaken by its worst disaster post-millenium in the massive earthquake that rocked southwestern Sichuan province killing tens of thousands and more still buried under the debris.
The government had ordered the people to observe three minutes of silence the same time the 8.0 magnitude quake hit as the country began three days of official mourning.
Television showed rescue teams in quake hit areas downing their tools in a mark of respect. Thousands in cities stood in utter silence.
In the morning, throughout the country flags were raised and then lowered to half-mast in memory of the deaths that included hundreds of school children who were in their classes when the tremor hit.
As of Sunday, the official death toll stood at 32,476 with almost 32,000 in Sichuan alone, and the number of injured was over 220,000.
“As far as we can remember, this is the first ever national mourning ever held for victims of natural disasters since the People’s Republic was founded in 1949,” the official Xinhua News Agency said in a commentary..
“Throughout China’s history, the practice has been reserved for emperors and top state leaders. The most recent national mourning many Chinese remember was held for the late leader Deng Xiaoping in 1997,” the commentary said.
Against the odds, two women were pulled out alive on Monday by rescuers, mostly soldiers, who had toiled around the clock to search for survivors under thousands of collapsed buildings including schools
Xinhua said one of them, a 50-year-old woman called Wang Fazhen, was extricated from the rubble of a residential block.
China’s seismology bureau on Sunday raised the force of the tremor to 8.0 surpassing the 7.8 quake that flattened the northern city of Tangshan in 1976 and left an estimated 250,000 dead in the deadliest such disaster of the last century.
At a primary school in Chengdu, the provincial capital, anxious parents stood outside when classes resumed on Monday and pupils raised their right hands in salute as the flag was hoisted up and dropped to half mast.
One parent said there was less pupils than usual because many parents were still worried about aftershocks in the city that suffered another strong tremor on Sunday morning.
“I am here only to pick up my children’s school bags. I won’t let them come to school until things are more stable,” said the parent, who has two children in separate primary schools.
He was told by teachers of the two schools that pupils would be moved to another venue to continue classes.
Outside the school fence remained a row of tents where people had been spending their nights since the quake.
The calamity has also cast a shadow over the domestic relay of the Beijing Olympics torch relay, which the Games organisers said will be stopped during the national mourning period “to honour the memory of those that lost their lives in the terrible earthquake.”
Donations from home and abroad have reached 8.945 billion yuan (US$1.278 billion dollars) in cash and goods , state media said.
As of Sunday afternoon, the death toll reached 31,978 in Sichuan, 364 in Gansu province, 113 in Shaanxi province, 16 in Chongqing municipality, two in Henan province and one each in Yunnan, Hubei province and Hunan provinces.