New horrors as devastated towns finally reached

CHINA: "DON'T HELP me, help the others - they need it more," said the woman as Chinese soldiers carried her on a stretcher after…

CHINA:"DON'T HELP me, help the others - they need it more," said the woman as Chinese soldiers carried her on a stretcher after pulling her from the wreckage of what was once Beichuan.

China's worst natural disaster in 30 years has claimed 20,000 lives so far, and state media said yesterday that it could eventually reach 50,000.

The selflessness of this woman from Beichuan is a sign of hope in a very dark place.

Beichuan county used to be home to 160,000 people, and most of them lived in the now abandoned town of Beichuan, nestling in one of the world's most beautiful valleys. But everyone is gone, either dead or having left the town.

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The woman had survived 72 hours under the rubble, during which time no one could get to Beichuan, which was too close to the earthquake's epicentre to stand a chance. The town has been destroyed, with many thousands of bodies still buried in the rubble. It's hard to imagine Beichuan ever functioning as a town again.

Soldiers rally behind red flags in a rescue area 3km away before trekking into the heart of this devastated town. There is still no access by road.

"There are people alive in there, and over there, and over there. But we can't get them out - what are we supposed to do?" said one rescuer, standing outside the ruins of a hairdressing salon. Another man was looking for his family and friends, and getting increasingly frustrated.

The narrow access leading up to the town is full of villagers bringing whatever few items they can take back to the refugee camps in neighbouring towns spared the worst of the quake. These are often old people who move slowly, clearly irritating the teenage troops itching to get past. But who is going to tell a grandmother carrying her life on her back to speed it up?

The first sighting of the town occurs some 2km away. It looks like a model village some child has melted and covered with sand. The town was built down the sides of the valley and so the buildings fell on top of each other in a kind of concertina, ending up in a huge pile at the base of the valley.

Every day it has seemed impossible to imagine things getting worse in Sichuan. Hanwang, with its bodies lying everywhere was grotesque. Dujiangyan, where hundreds of teenagers were dragged out dead from the mud, was a nightmare. No one knows what horrors await once Wenchuan, which is directly above the epicentre, is opened up.

At the first-aid station, there is no time for medics to find the survivor's name or medical history - she needs to be evacuated quick.

Incredibly, her relative was also found alive, and his eyes are bandaged because they cannot take the sunlight after three days in darkness. US paramedics working for the Heart to Heart organisation put her on a drip and give the man antibiotics.

The woman stretchered back across the mountains by eight soldiers, while her male relative has to walk, supported by four soldiers on the difficult 3km trek back to the rescue area on the other side of the hill.

"We've mostly been dragging out bodies today, but there are a lot of survivors too," said Heart to Heart volunteer Andrew Law.

Emergency room nurses Roger and Kelsey attend to the living, while a group of brawny expats in the provincial capital was doing great work, digging and bringing out bodies. Also helping was a group of middle-aged survivors from China's last great earthquake, Tangshan, in 1976, which killed about 300,000 people.

At the Beichuan Middle School, hundreds were buried alive, just as they had in other schools around Sichuan. The town's prison collapsed, and who knows how many convicts died in the wreckage.

It's impossible not to get swept up in the relief effort; everyone has to help. A distressed woman said she could hear cries from beneath the rubble and I was sent to find a stretcher and workers. But by the time we got back and the rubble shifted, there was only a body.

Rescuers clamber around the debris shouting "hello!" and "anyone there?" but only an eerie silence answers their calls.

The rescue effort is centred on one very small section on the edge of town, and only a tiny part of Beichuan has been explored this far. Premier Wen Jiabao, who has flown around from disaster area to disaster area, has visited the town twice so far, but he has only been able to issue words of encouragement to the rescue workers.

On the other side, back at the rescue station, after the trek back, rescuers form a cordon for the returning stretchers. When a survivor is brought through, the soldiers cheer, and when yet another stretcher comes through with a corpse either covered in blue tarpaulin or with the face covered by cloth, there are disappointed murmurs, sad comments.

The woman is brought through on the stretcher, her face covered by a scarf, and the response is muted.

She raises her hand and waves - the scarf has been placed over her face to protect her from the hot sun. Some of the PLA's most hardened troops cheer like schoolboys. This one is alive.

Driving up the valley, along the Chang Jiang, which we call the Yangtze, the JCB carrying a pile of bodies wrapped in tarpaulin was an early sign that the scene in Beichuan was going to be harrowing.

"Our house is smashed, broken. My father is in the hospital. We felt the quake - we were terribly scared and we rushed out. When we came out, we just saw white smoke and dust. My brother is in town, but I can't reach him. Lots of friends and relatives - we can't get in touch with them," says Fu Youjun (34), a farmer.

"The house is slipped, subsided. My nephew is in there, over there in Beichuan. What are we going to do?" says his wife, Wang Hongmei (30). "We just got married this year."

For some reason, after all the horrors of the previous hours, this is the kind of comment that can break your heart.

Listen to Clifford Coonan speaking from China on www.ireland.com