The Rebuilding Process in Sichuan Province Essay

On the afternoon of May 12, 2008 a 7.9-magnitude earthquake hit Sichuan Province, a mountainous region in Western China, killing about 70,000 people. Over 15 million people lived in the affected area, including almost 4 million in the city of Chengdu. The earthquake was so strong that the tremors were felt not only in Beijing and Hong Kong, but even in Vietnam, Thailand, Pakistan, and on Sumatra (Sichuan Earthquake 2009).
Sichuan earthquake was the strongest in China for more than thirty years – after the earthquake in the city Tianshan in 1976, when the death toll reached 250 thousand people. Sichuan earthquake took 69,226 lives, caused injuries to 374,643 people, and 17,923 people were classified as missing. 96 544 patients suffering from rampant floods were hospitalized (International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies 2009).
Sichuan earthquake has become the strongest in China after the Tianshan earthquake for the last 30 years. After Tianshan earthquake, China has established the standards of building construction, which were to help them to survive during the earthquake. But Sichuan earthquake has cast doubt on the fact that those standards were properly implemented.
In the Jiuquan city the three-story building of the local school collapsed, and buried 900 students and teachers under the rubble. Another school collapsed in the Beychuan county and a thousand of people was there under the rubble.
In the Shifan city, the earthquake completely destroyed the two chemical companies; hundreds of workers were in the rubble, and over eighty tons of liquid ammonia was spilled on adjacent territory.
The devastation has spread far beyond the province. In neighboring Gansu during the earthquake the freight train, that was transporting 13 tanks with gasoline, derailed, caught fire and continued to burn for couple days. There was a threat of explosion, so the authorities needed to evacuate about the thousand of local residents.
After the main earthquake, which occurred in the afternoon on Monday, there were also a recorded number of residual shocks. On Tuesday, the shocks become more frequent. The most powerful, with the magnitude of about 6.1 was recorded at 3 pm. Seismologists warned the Chinese people about the threat of new shocks. The rescuers evacuated 1 million 485.3 thousand people in total. After all 4.5 million people were left homeless, without documents, without means, without work, without family and friends.
The earthquake with its epicenter in Wenchuan caused serious damage to transport infrastructure in Sichuan Province, whose size was estimated at 47.82 billion yuan; it is about 6.8 billion U.S. dollars.
According to the province’s traffic management report, the greatest damage was done to high-speed highways, roads of state and provincial significance, as well as roads in rural areas. The total length of damaged rural roads exceeded 17 thousand km, and the economic impact of that reached 16.2 billion of yuan.
According to official government figures, the earthquake completely destroyed more than 5 million houses, and about the same number of houses was destroyed partly and required major repairs. The rail and road transport system, electricity and piping was disrupted in Sichuan are also. The whole region needed reconstruction and rebuilding.
When the reconstruction activities started, the provincial government was not sure it had enough funds for rebuilding process. The deputy head of the Government, Huang Xiaoxia announced that according to the plans of the provincial government in Sichuan there would be re-built 4,5 million houses in urban and rural areas, built 51,000 kilometers of roads and 5,5 thousands of railway tracks. As a part of reconstruction there were to be built nearly 12,000 schools, 9.7 thousand of medical institutions, 810 electrical power station, 2,000 water tanks and more than 100 thousand hectares of farmland (Prokos 2008).
Specialists expected to use 37 million tons of steel, 370 million tons of cement and over 210 billion bricks while reconstructing the region (Prokos 2008).