ANATOMY OF AN EARTHQUAKE

COPING WITH THE AFTERMATH

EXPERIENCING the fury of an earthquake is terrifying.  "There were books flying all around me from an eight-foot-high wooden wardrobe beside my bed," recalls a survivor  of a 1999 quake in Taiwan.  'A newly purchased motorcycle helmet founds it way off the top of my wardrobe and landed beside my head on my bed.  Ironically,' she adds,  'it could have killed me.'


Beyond Survival

Living through an earthquake is frightening, but surviving one is just the beginning.  In the hours following the event, relief workers courageously strive to locate and treat those who are injured. Often, hey do so under the threat of aftershocks.  "We have to be extremely careful," said one man who contemplated digging through a mountain of dirt that had buried a neighborhood after a recent quake in El Salvador.  "If suddenly the ground moves again, the rest of this hill could go." 

Sometimes individuals demonstrate extraordinary self-sacrifice in reaching  out to victims. For example, when a massive earthquake occurred in India early in 2001, Manu, an elderly man who now lives in the United States, returned to his homeland.   "I must go," he reasoned, "not just to help my family, but everyone who is suffering."  Manu found conditions to be deplorable in the regions he visited.  Nevertheless, he noted:  "The courage people show is astounding."  Wrote one journalist:  "I don't know anyone living around me who did not give whatever he or she could spare-a day's, a week's, or a month's salary, a portion of their savings or whatever they could do without to help." 

Of course, it is one thing to clear out the rubble and treat the injured; it is quite another to restore a sense of normalcy to lives that have been turned upside down by a few moments of terror. Consider Delores, a woman who lost her home in the quake in El Salvador.   "This is worse than the war," she says.   "At least then we had a roof."  

Next time: ANATOMY OF AN EARTHQUAKE/Conclusion of Beyond Survival

From the Awake! magazine