Fifteen years have passed, and no matter how many years pass, I have entered the age of antiquity, but I can never forget that long day! Five. On the occasion of the 15th anniversary of the 12 earthquakes, we will re-send our previous memories so that we can always remember the hardships we have experienced together.
A Long Day: Remembering the Wenchuan Earthquake on May 12, 2008
In order to complete the submission of the "Pilgrim Post" photo exhibition jointly organized by China Post and La Poste at the "Louvre Museum in Paris" in the autumn of that year, I drove to the Central Office of the postal district far away on Airport Road. The specific details of the shoot and the need for help from the Central Post Office need to be communicated and contacted with them in advance.
According to the picture I designed and conceived, surrounded by mountains and ravines, a team of mail trucks cut through the clouds and fog and drove on a winding road with extremely fast turns. The four big characters of "China Post" on the carriage are particularly dazzling. Isn't this "Pilgrim Post"? The filming location was selected on the winding mountain road on Taibai Mountain in Shaanxi Province on the Chengdu to Baoji Post Road. Seven of the latest container mail trucks have been implemented, and they have all gone to wash the carriages cleanly. A leading car was also set. All the drivers involved in the shooting also held a meeting and I explained the requirements and precautions, and even the walkie-talkies for communication on the road were also implemented, and the departure time was set at 7 o'clock in the morning on the 13th. Everything is ready, just ready to go. After such detailed preparations, it seems that not only the submission, but also the possibility of winning awards in the film festival. Maybe you might even have a chance to go to the Louvre Museum in Paris to receive your prize. I left the central bureau and drove towards the city.
On the way back to the city, the dream of buying a new camera came back to me, and the two amateur cameras I already had could handle the needs of this shoot? I've never used a camera in my unit because it's worse than my own camera in terms of function level, and this time I'm participating in an international film festival, and I'm sorry for my idea, the eight drivers who followed me for such a big lap and such detailed preparations, so I couldn't help but drive the car to the door of the Nikon camera store. After choosing for a long time, I gritted my teeth and took out all my savings, and spent more than 30,000 yuan to buy the body of a top professional camera at that time, Nikon D3, and I couldn't even afford a professional lens, so I replaced it with my original Nikon F90 zoom lens. Holding the new machine, I returned to the unit very proudly, and it was already half past twelve.
I went downstairs to the small restaurant to eat something casually, and returned to the office on the twenty-fifth floor at two o'clock, and I didn't even breathe, and I thought that I would use a new camera the next day, and I was not even familiar with the functions of the new camera, how to shoot the work, so I installed the lens, and I needed to be familiar with the new camera, otherwise I didn't know how to use it when I arrived in Taibai Mountain, so I took the new machine and walked to the window behind me.
As soon as I stood up, I suddenly heard a sound similar to the roar of a tractor coming from nowhere, and suddenly I felt the whole building under my feet jump up and fall heavily, and then the moment of this shaking, the whole building began to shake regularly, only to hear the steel bars of the wall being pulled and creaking, and the ceiling made of metal frames on the roof fell to the ground with a clatter, making people feel that the whole building was about to collapse. It took a momentary short circuit in the brain to understand that it was an earthquake! As the building shook more and more, I thought to myself that I couldn't afford it, and that I had just spent all my savings, and I might be buried in the ruins of this building along with this brand new camera. But at the same time, I thought that if I could keep the moment of the earthquake in the camera, even if it was dug up by the disaster relief people in the future, wouldn't the images recorded on the camera card still provide some useful information? So I finally insisted on walking to the window, as the building swayed more and more violently, people couldn't stand steadily, I held the window with one hand, and the other hand held the camera to keep shooting downstairs through the space opened by the window.
I saw that on the street below, people poured out of the buildings like swarms of ants, and ran to the street where they thought they were safe; Suddenly, the moving car involuntarily turned onto the sidewalk and crashed into a tree. Outside my window is a three-story building, why I will stand on the left side of the small building, and then stand on the right side of the small building, it turns out that the building is shaken to the left and the right for a while, which shows how much the tall building I am in is shaking from side to side. After dozens of seconds, the shaking stopped, and when I looked back, I saw that all the comrades in the same office had run away, and I was left alone in the entire office. So I took the camera and took the elevator downstairs unhurriedly (this is extremely wrong, the last thing I can do when the earthquake happens is to take the elevator). I went downstairs, and the comrades who ran downstairs through the walking ladder had not yet run to the ground, so I held the camera and laughed while taking pictures of their "embarrassed appearance", and the female comrades who usually wore high heels did not know where they left their high heels, and almost all ran out barefoot (it is very inconvenient for high heels to go downstairs), and some comrades were hit by the door that bounced back and broke their foreheads, and they were bleeding ......; The company's CEO's phone rang non-stop, and grassroots units in all directions of Chengdu were reporting news of the local earthquake. This has aroused my sensitivity and vigilance. Because I am the head of the rights and interests protection department of the provincial postal trade union, in charge of the disaster relief work of the province's postal service, there have been disasters before, the real affected places are reporting the disaster, and the places that have not been affected are also taking the opportunity to lie, in order to take this opportunity to ask the higher authorities to allocate limited disaster relief funds! In my own judgment, the building I am in is shaking from east to west, so the center of the earthquake is either east or west of Chengdu, and I need to know the specific information of the earthquake immediately. So I went into the empty building again, turned on my computer and looked at it.
A message suddenly jumped into my eyes, "There was an 8-magnitude earthquake in Wenchuan, Sichuan" (as expected, as I judged that the earthquake occurred in the west of Chengdu), but at 3 o'clock, the news was immediately changed to 7.8. I was about to go downstairs, suddenly the landline on the desk rang, picked up the phone and asked, it turned out to be located in Dujiangyan near the Pixian Tangchang Postal Printing Factory to report the disaster call, the wireless communication at that time was all interrupted, the wired telephone is still open, the printing plant in the case of not being able to get through the mobile phone, flipping through the provincial bureau's address book one by one, and finally dialed the phone. I asked the director on the other end of the phone about the damage in the factory, and he replied that there were houses that collapsed and five people were injured, but there were no deaths. I comforted him a few words, hung up the phone and went downstairs to report to the leader.
The downstairs is not quiet, the street is full of people who have run out of the house to take refuge, the street is crowded with cars that can't drive, and even the consul of the Korean consulate is standing on the street with his subordinates, vigilantly looking at the high-rise buildings, afraid that these high-rise buildings will collapse at any time! I found the leader standing under the cross-line bridge and reported the disaster situation of the postal printing plant, who knew that the leader immediately assigned the human resources department and the comrades in charge of a variety of operations to go to the disaster site with me to check the disaster situation, and went to Dujiangyan and Pixian post offices to see the disaster situation, and went to Xinjin to see the disabled workers who lived there because of their work and were disabled, and settled them down. So he sent a small car with a military license plate and set off.
After the earthquake, almost all the roads were blocked or traffic was controlled, but our car was a military license plate issued by the Traffic War Readiness Office, and we could continue to drive.
In fact, I didn't know enough about the serious consequences of the earthquake at that time, when our car just entered Dujiangyan, and saw that the seven residential buildings connected to the road had collapsed into a pile of soil, I thought at that time, even if all the residents living in the building were Monkey King, they couldn't fly out, and China really suffered a great disaster (in fact, the disaster in Dujiangyan was not affected by the Yingxiu, Hanwang, Beichuan, and Qingchuan that I went to later). The streets of Dujiangyan are full of mourning, the streets are full of injured people lying on newspapers or cardboard for infusion, the sirens of ambulances are like a burst, medical personnel are busy rescuing the wounded, firefighters are busy rescuing people in front of collapsed houses, taxi drivers in Chengdu have also begun to voluntarily transfer the wounded and sick, and a few hours after the earthquake began, everything is disorderly and orderly.
When I arrived at the Dujiangyan County Bureau, I saw that the bureau was seriously damaged, and the employees did not die after counting, but there were not a few family members and children who died due to the earthquake. I asked about the situation of the Dujiangyan County Bureau, and immediately went to the Tangchang Printing Factory to check the disaster, and one of the buildings of the printing factory collapsed from the original three floors to two floors, and one family building completely collapsed, but fortunately in the moment before the floor collapsed, the workers and their families in the building ran out, but there were five workers who were smashed or injured in the process of running out of the building, but they were not serious.
It was getting dark, and on the way back, after checking the damage at the Pixian Post Office, I didn't care about eating (there were no shops or restaurants open on the street), and drove to Xinjin in the south of Chengdu.
After asking for a long time, I finally found the neighbor of the disabled worker, saying that after the earthquake, the worker was blind and unable to move, and felt too unsafe under the threat of aftershocks one after another, and had moved to the relative's house in the countryside to take refuge. Relieved by this, he embarked on the road back to the provincial bureau.
There were no passers-by and no passing vehicles along the way, and it was as quiet as the end of the earth, and when I returned to the provincial bureau, it was already past twelve o'clock in the middle of the night.
"May 12th", this is really an unforgettable and unforgettable day.
Edit: Iron Edge