11:09 a.m., Oct. 31, 2008----Nearly 70,000 people perished in the earthquake that hit Sichuan Province in western China on May 12. The magnitude 7.9 quake caused massive property damage and left millions homeless.

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While local and national Chinese government agencies have followed rescue with rebuilding, researchers including Tricia Wachtendorf, UD assistant professor of sociology and associate director of the University of Delaware's Disaster Research Center, have been conducting research efforts on the various societal and structural effects of China's worst earthquake in more than 30 years.

Wachtendorf was part of a multidisciplinary team hosted by the China Earthquake Administration that traversed the province from Aug. 2-16, spending time in heavily impacted areas. The research effort was supported by the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute and the National Science Foundation.

“My work focused on the societal and community impacts of the May 12th earthquake, and was less focused on systematic data but more on identifying key research areas for future study,” Wachtendorf said. “These reconnaissance efforts are important to collect perishable data that may not otherwise be available by the time formal research projects are funded.”

Such studies also help to establish or strengthen ties with local researchers and agencies conducting work in impacted areas, Wachtendorf said.

“The researchers asked questions related to their disciplines, on a variety of topics, including fault lines, land slides, structural engineering implications and impact on transportation,” Wachtendorf said. “It is very important for organizations to work with their formal government counterparts in China.”

Because of the extensive nature of the damage from the earthquake, security was tight and many areas took a considerable time to reach, Wachtendorf said.

“The roads were in very poor condition, and we had difficulty in getting around,” Wachtendorf said. “We had to get permission to go into specific areas on special days. I was the only social scientist among a group that included planners, and structural and civil engineers.”

Wachtendorf said that some towns were completely destroyed, and that aftershocks were a daily experience, with landslides continuing to block access to certain areas.

“The people we spoke with were unsure what the next few months would bring, particularly as government stipends were coming to an end,” Wachtendorf said. “At the same time, however, it was common to see people taking the initiative to clean up their own communities one brick at a time, slowly reopening their businesses and demonstrating a great deal of resilience.”

An innovative approach designed to help facilitate response and recovery efforts was the pairing of impacted areas with another province or major Chinese city, Wachtendorf said.

“One of the things we noticed was the significant involvement of community-based groups coming to an event to help out,” Wachtendorf said. “The challenge is integrating the necessary response effort, filling in the gaps in coordination.”

While camps, which each housed as many as 12,000 displaced people, were constructed quickly, many quake victims opted to remain closer to home due to the impractically of traveling long distances to their places of work and to tend the crops in the area.

Wachtendorf said she hopes that the reconnaissance efforts in China will result in future collaborations between scholars in the U.S. and China, while providing materials for her classes on the sociology of disaster.

“One of the issues I hope to explore further is the role of volunteers and nongovernmental organizations in the disaster response and relief efforts, a role more prominent in this case than in the previous disasters,” Wachtendorf said. “I also brought back pictures and video that our students might be able to use as a means to understand the issues in a disaster in an international context. Learning from earthquakes is vital if we are to better understand these events and take steps to make our communities safer.”

Article by Jerry Rhodes
China photos courtesy of Tricia Wachtendorf