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Schools Fell While Other Buildings Held
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Zhang Longfu, 39, whose 12-year-old daughter, Zhang Ju, died at the school, said there is no evidence that the building ever had a solid frame. In the ruins, other than the concrete, there are only tiles and a few pieces of twisted metal cables.
"This building is totally a 'bad tofu' project," Zhang Longfu said, using the term in China for cheap, shoddy construction work. "Look at it -- it's not properly done. We feel it is wrong for kids to die this way."
The Nightmare Begins
On May 12, the first sign of the nightmare to come was the dust.
At 2:28 p.m., Zhou Yang was in front of the school playing with friends when the ground shook. Dust started to emanate from the building. "I thought, 'I just had a shower. I don't want to get dirty.' So I stayed outside," Yang later recalled.
Then the screaming began. The windows blew out. Pieces of the building started falling off.
The quake occurred at just about the worst time for the students. Their midday break was ending, but class hadn't yet started. That meant nearly all of the students were in the building, but few of the school's 32 teachers were there to offer direction.
Students in Yang's third-grade class were lucky. Because they were on the first floor, they quickly stampeded out through four exits.
In the fourth-grade classroom next door, teacher Li Mingqing was yelling: "It's an earthquake! Run, children, run!" Li recalled seeing Ding Yao, the girl with pigtails, moving slowly. She scooped her up, tucked the girl's head down and ran for safety.
Li's classroom had been packed with 75 students for the awards ceremony. But one of the doors was locked. The students struggled to get through the remaining door. Only 36 made it out.
Students in the fifth- and sixth-grade classes upstairs also started fleeing. But only so many who could fit on the stairs at one time. A few tried to take the bridge to the teachers' building but then changed their minds and turned around. They had been told that they would be punished if they ever took that route.
Peng Xinyin and Sang Xingpeng were next to each other, somewhere in the middle of the crowd.
Li, the teacher, had barely cleared the building when it collapsed. "I turned around and looked and thought, 'What now? What now?' " she recalled.
