Travel China Planner

Crowds around the Bell Tower Area at the time of earthquake video.

Earthquake happened on May 12, 2008. Around 2PM, I had a smoke break after lunch. When I sat in front of my computer, its screen started waving from left to right and right to left again. I felt like cigarratte sickness happened on me years after my junior high school. Then I stand up to see if I was really affected by cigarratte sickness. Dan Wang, one of my colleague, shout that she felt dizzy. Qian Feng followed up, is earthquake happening? Then, Peng yelled “RUN”. I flipped down my laptop and unpluged adapter as fast as I can be, while I picked up my laptop case at same time.

It’s all happened in a blink of my eyes and I continued to run outta the door. We were on the 14th floor of 24. God, we headed down to the stairway instead of elevator right way. We did not see any one from 14th to 10th floor. When we ran to the 10th, there’s some people blocked stairway. More and more people are rushing to the stairway when we stepped down the floor each by each.

At the same time, the stairway’s started waving again and breaking sound of window glass reached my ears and I have only one thought that I can’t die because of this, I have alot of things not finished to do. Then I started yell at people in my front, “run faster!!!”

From 10th floor till the ground floor, we felt like we spent more than half hour. I asked my co-workers to get away from office building as far as possible till we arrived at an open area. The side walk has been loaded with hundreds of thousands of people already. We started to call our friends and other colleagues who were not with us. Regretly, no signal, we kept calling for hours but still not work at all. Apparently, ChinaMoble’s network is fully jammed, the capacity of its network really needs to be upgraded.

We headed to a convenient store and bought some ice scream then we sat down on the sidewalk and discussing what’s gonna happen next. I tried to call my girlfriend but no network coverage for hours. I SMS her to becareful and she called me back 2 hours later that she’s fine.

We did not get back to our office since the earthquake happened. Most people were chatting outdoor at open area or sild walk where far away from skycrapers. My dad called and told me that news in Beijing has reported the earthquake was actually happened somewhere in Sichuan. We are neighboring Sichuan province to north. Fortunately, there’s Qin Mountain Ridge between the 2 provinces, so the impact wave had been reduced alot. Level of this earthquake in Xian is about 4 but about 7 in Sichuan province.