Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: Imagine 21 million people locked down in a city, mostly living in high-rises, and not allowed to come out despite a strong earthquake hitting their area. They are living in mortal fear, panicked as aftershocks hit their dwellings, still shaking with tremors.
This is happening in China’s southwestern Chengdu mega-city, where officials are keeping stringent Covid-19 lockdown measures on the city, despite a major temblor that killed at least 65 people in outlying areas.
The media reported that workers wearing top-to-bottom protective gear prevented the panicked residents of apartment buildings from exiting through locked lobby doors following Monday’s 6.8 magnitude quake centered in the surrounding province of Sichuan.
The mega-quake shook buildings in Chengdu and other parts of western China, but they reported no damage in the city. The quake struck a mountainous area in Luding county, on the edge of the Tibetan Plateau, around 200 km from Chengdu, where the planet’s tectonic plates grind up against each other.
Chengdu’s lockdown is as complete as it was in the largest city of Shanghai over the summer.
China continues to stick to its hard-line zero-Covid policy of compulsory testing, lockdowns, quarantines, and masking despite advice from the World Health Organization (WHO) and moves by most other countries to open up again since the virus was first detected in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019.
The Monday quake disrupted power and damaged buildings in the historic mountain town of Moxi in the Tibetan autonomous prefecture of Garze, where 37 people were killed. They erected tents for over 50,000 people being moved from homes made unsafe by the quake.
Along with the deaths, authorities reported landslides that damaged homes, caused power interruptions, and stranded people behind a newly created lake. One landslide blocked a rural highway, leaving it strewn with boulders.
The temblor and lockdown follow a heat wave and drought that led to water shortages and power cuts because of Sichuan’s reliance on hydropower.
China’s deadliest earthquake in recent years was a 7.9 magnitude quake in 2008 that killed nearly 90,000 people in Sichuan. The temblor devastated towns, schools, and rural communities outside Chengdu, leading to a years-long effort to rebuild with more resistant materials.