Xinhua is reporting that four are dead and 10 injured after a 5.9-magnitude earthquake (5.8-magnitude according to the US Geological Survey) struck the tourist area of Shangri-la in Yunnan province this morning.

The quake hit the border area of Shangri-La and Deqen counties in Yunnan Province and Derong County in Sichuan Province at 8:04 a.m., according to the China Earthquake Network Center.

Four people died and six others were injured in Deqen County, and the quake has toppled 600 residential units and damaged 55,500 others, and some 9,200 local residents have been forced to relocate, according to a statement from the Yunnan Provincial Civil Affairs Department.

Disaster relief teams have been dispatched amid landslides and severed communication lines.

A 5.1-magnitude earthquake hit the area on Wednesday, affecting more than 52,000 residents, according to Xinhua.

Some pictures via China News:

Graphic via

Twin earthquakes of 5.9 and 5.6 magnitude struck near Dingxi in Gansu province on Monday morning, leaving at least 89 dead and hundreds more injured. (The magnitude numbers are via the US Geological Survey; the China Earthquake Networks Center measured it at 6.6). The latest from AFP states, “China’s official Xinhua news agency said initial investigations showed at least 5,785 houses had collapsed and another 73,000 were severely damaged.”

The above footage was from a surveillance camera inside a cafeteria in Minxian county, Gansu. The one man in the scene flees as soon as the ground begins to shake, as he well should. Tiles begin falling from the ceiling while a TV continues playing in the background.

Right, no.

It’s a quaint idea — using canines to predict the earth’s tremors — but after implementation in one Chinese city, it’s also something else: really annoying. Here’s AFP with the story:

The earthquake authority of Nanchang, the capital of Jiangxi province in the east, keeps dogs since they will “act abnormally when an earthquake is coming”, sometimes up to 10 days in advance, an official surnamed Song told AFP.

The bureau used the dogs at the request of the provincial government, he added, saying that chickens and ducks could be effective as well.

But neighbours are complaining on social media about the animals’ nightly howling, according to the official provincial news website Dajiang.

“The compound of the Nanchang earthquake authority has I don’t know how many dogs, every night at 11 pm they start barking over and over,” it quoted one as saying.

So, what if the dogs were muzzled?

Asked if that would stop them carrying out their predictive function, [Song] agreed and said he would ask his boss what to do about that, [Dajiang] reported.

Maybe just stick with the man-made tools for now, guys. UPDATE, 5:59: Unless we’re talking about this dog.

Curious incident of China’s quake dogs in the night-time (AFP)

The first Chinese official to lose his job as a result of the Ya’an Earthquake is Yang Chengyi, 47, of Qingyuan township. Did he embezzle aid? Wear a gold watch? Smile while inspecting an accident site when he should have frowned?

If only.

According to SCMP, Yang was fired after failing to meet with disciplinary inspectors because he was busy working in the field.

Internet users applauded Yang’s down-to-earth working style, saying that officials like him should be promoted, not sacked.

Many wryly noted that doing nothing had become the common practice for party cadres.

Yang refused to comment on his own removal, saying he was too busy participating in relief efforts to discuss the move.

“I just want to do my best for the relief effort, there are tons of things to do,” he said, his voice cracking. “I don’t want to defend myself. I just want to do my best to help the villagers.”

Lily Kuo recently wrote for Quartz about how being a Chinese official is one of the worst jobs in the world. On top of all the typical reasons (including those that are tongue-in-cheek), add “surrounded by incompetence” to the list.

There are plenty of reasons to punish officials, but “working overtime” shouldn’t be one of them. Or failing to attend a meeting… meetings, by the way, which are the bane of humanity. Look for Yang to get rehired soon, possibly by an office a little smarter than the one that just relieved him.

Outpouring of sympathy online for sacked official in quake zone (SCMP)

Praise and derision on Sina Weibo for this picture, posted yesterday to the People’s Liberation Army Chengdu military account. But praise and derision is what you’ll get for any popular Sina Weibo post, basically. Can we just sit back and admire this?

“…PLA corps of engineers carrying an astonished-looking pig to safety,” notes SCMP’s Patrick Boehler. The Weibo post has been shared nearly 40,000 times as of this moment.

It’s good to see, finally, human begins carrying live pigs for a change.

On April 20, a 6.6-magnitude earthquake struck Lushan in Sichuan, 160 km southwest of the provincial capital of Chengdu. While much smaller than the 8.0-magnitude (125 times more severe) quake that hit the region in 2008, Xinhua reports that there are 192 dead and more than 11,000 injured.

Sichuan is no stranger to earthquakes. Since records began there have been 28 measuring at least 6.0 in magnitude in the province. The fault line lies between the Longman Mountains and Sichuan basin, and is caused by India’s drift northwards, forcing Tibet eastward. This combination applies pressure on Sichuan, which is being squeezed on both sides.

The natural problems caused by continental drift are compounded by the construction of many dams along the fault lines.

Shemin Ge of the University of Colorado told New Scientist that the 2008 earthquake might have been, at least, partially triggered by the giant Zipingpu Reservoir, located 20 km from the epicenter. The reservoir would have increased the pressure in the rocks.

It’s too early to know whether reservoir-building contributed to last week’s quake. Of more immediate concern is the damage to dams and reservoirs, says Mian Liu of the University of Missouri in Columbia. According to the Ministry of Water Resources, two medium-sized and 52 small dams were damaged, with residents evacuated downstream of five of them.

It would be wise to earthquake-proof all the dams to ensure a bad situation doesn’t become infinitely worse with the addition of gushing water. (In 2011, Adam Minter wrote about the effect of the Three Gorges Project on natural disasters, namely earthquakes and droughts.)

Of course, all stories about that possibility are quickly being censored, as you can see on Buzzfeed via @CensoredWeibo:

Also, according to New Scientist:

The 2008 quake, whose epicentre was 85 kilometres away, may also have contributed to the latest event, by redistributing pressure along the Longmen Shan fault line, says Liu. In the aftermath, he calculated that it had increased the risk of another magnitude-7 quake within the next 50 years by a few per cent. “Seems nature was in a hurry,” he says of last week’s quake.

Earthquake prediction is still more of an art than a science, but Ge predicts that because of the pressure built up due to the last two quakes, the area most at risk is the Aninghe fault line farther south. When it will hit, no one knows.

Parvez tweets @neo2049 (Image Buzzfeed, h/t David Bateman)

If you’ll allow yourself a quick moment of unabashedly sentimental feel-goodness, please turn your attention to this story out of Longmen Township in Sichuan province.

A Youku citizen journalist encountered an old couple walking down a mountain road in this earthquake-striken part of town on Monday at 9 am. The woman, hard of hearing, is 90 years old this year, while her husband is 88.

The couple has no home to return to — “just a tent,” says the husband. Asked if she was scared when the earthquake struck, the wife says, “Of course. How can we not be scared? I was almost buried by the earthquake. I can hardly walk anymore, must use this cane.”

The couple had just woken when the ground began to rumble. The wife crawled out from under rubble. “Were you hurt?” the young lady behind the camera asks. “No,” is the relpy.

And so, after telling their story, the two try to stand up to resume their short but difficult journey. The man gets to his feet first, and then has to help his wife. “If we can’t go, then we can’t go,” the woman says, struggling to gain her balance. She grasps her husband’s hand as they continue onward, each also grasping a bamboo cane. Very slowly they trudge ahead, toward their tent, and a family. They’re together, and that’s all that matters.

The earth’s convulsion along the Longmenshan front on Saturday jiggered a few rocks loose from the mountains of Sichuan, among other things, and on a narrow road connecting Longmentong and Baosheng Township, a boulder rested squarely in the middle, blocking everything. Two days later, the bulldozers were out, along with a demolition team. Uniformed young men, looking like China’s version of the national guard, ushered villagers from the area. Experts drilled a hole into the boulder, then packed it with gunpowder. Then, beginning at the 2:40 mark, a silent countdown… toward… KABLOOEY.

The suffering and grief that accompanies the loss of an only-child is already unimaginable, but what about the loss of two children, in the same place, five years apart, to the same natural disaster? Lu Jingkang, 50, has lost both her children: her son in 2008 to the Wenchuan earthquake, and her daughter on Saturday in the Ya’an earthquake, both occurring along the Longmenshan fault in Sichuan province

“God has been too harsh on me, way too harsh,” Lu told the Yangtse Evening Post on Sunday in incredible understatement, as relayed by SCMP.

Lu said she had never fully recovered from the tremendous grief after losing her son in 2008. Her daughter gave her the only solace over the years.

The teenage girl had written in her diary once: “There is already too much weeping at home. I won’t cry anymore… [and I] shall become Mum’s mainstay,” the Post reported.

If there is fairness in the universe, luck and happiness and life’s melange of tender and good, it comes at the incredible cost of calamity borne by individuals such as Lu, counterweight to weight. Somewhere in the rubble, a child is born, and he will prosper. There is no other comfort.

Mother loses son, then daughter in both Sichuan earthquakes (SCMP)

Wu Yong, who lost his only son in the Ya’an Earthquake, initially comes across as calm and collected as he recalls the story of how he discovered his child buried, while sleeping, under rubble. When his stoic front finally crumbles and he sobs into his hand, what we have is a human face, an individual, in the wake of a collective tragedy.

“No pandas affected in Sichaun quake,” reads this China Daily headline. Try telling that to the panda in the above video, filmed at the Bifeng Gorge Base of China Panda Protection and Research Center. We’ve never seen a panda move that fast, except maybe down slides.

The Bifengxia base of the more well-known Wolong Nature Reserve is located only 18 kilometers from Ya’an, the earthquake’s epicenter. The pandas there were all fine, too.

A 6.6/7.0-magnitude earthquake (according to the US Geological Survey/China Earthquake Networks Center) affecting 69 counties and 1.5 million people struck Sichuan province at 8:02 am on Saturday. People are calling it the Ya’an Earthquake, after the city where the the epicenter is located, 140 kilometers from the capital Chengdu. The current death toll is 203, with more than 11,000 injured. (Ed’s note, 1:47 pm: more recent and reliable sources have the figure at “at least 186.”)

The quake is along the Longmenshan fault, the same one in which an earthquake on May 12, 2008 killed nearly 70,000 people. More information follows.

Start here:

“The epicenter, with a depth of 13 km, was monitored at 30.3 degrees north latitude and 103.0 degrees east longitude.” (Xinhua)

“On a continental scale, the seismicity of central and eastern Asia is a result of northward convergence of the India plate against the Eurasia plate with a velocity of about 50 mm/y. The convergence of the two plates is broadly accommodated by the uplift of the Asian highlands and by the motion of crustal material to the east away from the uplifted Tibetan Plateau.” (USGS)

And here. “In the fog-covered town of Shuangli, corn farmer Zheng Xianlan said Sunday that she had rushed from the fields back to her home when the quake struck, and cried when she saw that the roof collapsed. She then spent the night outdoors on a worn sofa using a plastic raincoat for cover. // ‘We don’t earn much money. We don’t know what we will do now,’ said 58-year-old Zheng, her eyes welling with tears. ‘The government only brought one tent for the whole village so far, but that’s not enough for us.’” (Gillian Wong, AP)

Politicians learn. “For all of the similarities, there were some encouraging contrasts that remind us of things that have changed in China in the past five years. In the 2008 quake, papers across the country proclaimed, in almost perfect unison, that the earthquake had ‘tugged at the heartstrings of the Chinese Communist Party.’ At the time, I was in Beijing, and I rounded up the local papers and marvelled at their consistency… // But this time, there was instant discussion on Chinese social media: photos from deep inside the disaster zone; independent calls for donations—in yuan and in bitcoin. Before the day was out, the newly installed Premier, Li Keqiang, was flying to the disaster zone, and state media was quoting him saying, ‘The current most urgent issue is grasping the first twenty-four hours after the quake’s occurrence, the golden time for saving lives.’” (Evan Osnos, New Yorker)

Chinese Red Cross told to GTFO. “The charitable organization was among the first to respond to the disaster Saturday morning, announcing on the Twitter-like Sina Weibo microblogging service that it had dispatched a team to investigate the situation on the ground. The response was almost instantaneous as thousands of microbloggers took to the comment section to post animated thumbs-down emoticons and profane suggestions that the organization take a hike.” (WSJ)

Baby born in diaster area. “Ms. Cao had been in the hospital since April 10 and was long overdue, according to CNS. She is reportedly considering naming her new daughter Zhensheng, or Quake-Born.” (WSJ)

In a wedding dress. “Ya’an TV news reporter Chen Ying conducted street interviews immediately after the 7.0-magnitude earthquake hits Ya’an, Southwest China’s Sichuan Province at around 8 am on April 20, when she was putting on the make-up for her wedding ceremony and was already wearing the wedding dress.” (Global Times)

That wedding reporter interlude, via Shanghaiist:

Finally…

Rolling updates. (Earthquake Report)

Pictures. (CCTV)

First-hand account. (Chengdu Living)

Angst and sorrow on social media. (Tea Leaf Nation)

Student saves pet turtle in earthquake. (chinaSMACK)

Live blog. (SCMP)

Finally, finally…

Premier Li Keqiang eating Ramen in an earthquake relief tent… story via China Daily.

(H/T China Digital Times, the Beijinger)