Cascadia's Fault - Jerry Thompson [118]
Early casualty and damage reports were both convoluted and classified. For some reason it was customary in China to record living space in rural communities by the number of individual rooms but in urban centers by square area (including schools, offices, and factories). So rather than count the total number of buildings wrecked, a secret document on the Haicheng incident reported 17,497,342 square yards (14,630,000 m2) of urban living space and 1,840,000 rural rooms had been damaged or destroyed. More than 6.5 million feet (2 million meters) of various transportation lines and pipelines were damaged, more than seven hundred hydraulic facilities and two thousand bridges were damaged, and seventy square miles (180 km2) of farmland were wrecked by liquefaction and sand fountains. The total economic loss was estimated to be at least a billion yuan.
The reported death toll, a number both political and vague, was also kept secret until after the end of the Cultural Revolution. In the immediate aftermath phrases like “a few fatalities” in a population of a million people appeared in press releases from the official Chinese news agency. In 1988, when a Chinese researcher with better access to original documents reported a death toll of 1,328, skeptics in the West immediately pounced on the so-called discrepancy as evidence that the whole story of the Haicheng prediction was a gross exaggeration.
One skeptic in particular, Robert J. Geller, an American seismologist on the faculty at Tokyo University and a vehement doubter of the value and practicality of seismic forecasting worldwide, commented that “the large disparity between the reports of 1975 and 1988 casts doubt on claims for the Haicheng prediction.” Kelin Wang and his colleagues in 2004 pointed out that there was no real discrepancy. It was simply a case of China not releasing the early details to foreigners in the 1970s.
In March, a month after the rupture, Party officials launched a publicity campaign with a news release that said, “The earthquake-work team of our country predicted this earthquake; under the unified leadership of the Liaoning Provincial Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, the Party [members], government, army, and masses in the epicentral area took timely and effective preventative measures, so that losses caused by the earthquake in this densely populated area were greatly reduced. This is a vivid demonstration of the superiority of our country’s socialist system. This is a great victory of Chairman Mao’s proletarian revolutionary line!”
In other words the exact number of deaths didn’t really matter. What counted, in the minds of Chairman Mao’s publicity machine, was that China’s ability to mobilize the masses to tackle a complex scientific challenge had paid off. A natural disaster that could have killed many more did not.
When Kelin Wang and company were allowed to see previously secret documents in 2004, a new and presumably more accurate set of numbers could be compiled for the first time. Combining “direct” and “indirect” causes—many died from fires and as many as 372 died from hypothermia, freezing to death outside just like the snakes—the total death toll for the Haicheng earthquake became 2,041 and the total number of people injured was 24,538.
To make the evacuation story look even more impressive, some news releases described the total region affected as having more than eight million people. Even if the population in the epicentral area was really closer to a million—the original figure cited by most authorities—at 2,041, the number of deaths is still quite small given the collapse of so many houses. A report by the U.S. delegation of scientists who visited the disaster zone in 1977 estimated that “casualties in excess of 100,000 would have ordinarily been anticipated.”
It’s safe to say the Chinese government had a success story worthy of bragging about even without fudging the numbers. The political