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YONGAN (China) - YONGAN has become a ghost town. Its residents are either dead, evacuated, or camping out in the local school yard.
Just a few kilometres south of Beichuan, where state media have reported thousands of deaths from Monday's massive earthquake in the southwestern Chinese province of Sichuan, Yongan has been almost totally destroyed.
'It was the most frightening experience of my life,' said Mr Li Hui, carting what remains of his possessions down one of the town's streets, strewn with rubble and bricks.
'Dozens died, but it could have been a lot worse. Fortunately it hit in the afternoon when many people were outside.' Now, with the streets eerily quiet, those who remain are desperately hoping for aid, which they can see speeding past them on the road up to Beichuan.
'I haven't eaten in two days,' grumbled Ms Ding Xiuyong, following behind Mr Li, her hair matter with dirt.
'Aid has not yet started to reach us. It's all going to Beichuan first.'
Power lines strung through the picturesque and towering mountains that surround the area are still standing, though some substations have been destroyed and there is no power.
Landslides partially block roads, and huge rocks cleaved off the hillside have sliced through a wing of a Daoist temple close by.
Wandering through Yongan, the destructive power of the quake is everywhere to be seen, as well as evidence of how it hit suddenly and caught people off guard.
In one house, mahjong tiles sit on a playing table, as though in the middle of a game, lacking only the players and the cacophony of sound and clacking of the pieces that normally accompanies it.
But part of the roof has fallen in, leaving the room exposed to the elements and heat which has followed after days of mist and cold rain.
In another house down the street that has no front wall, two cats peer out at visitors from under a sofa covered in dust, waiting for owners to return who are possibly dead.
The roof of outlying buildings of the town's school is nothing more than shattered tiles. A single shoes lies in the doorway of one classroom, where the day's lesson is still scrawled on the blackboard and children's paintings flutter in the breeze.
'There was only one light injury here,' said Mr Lu Zaoqun, 53, camping out in the school yard with his family under hastily assembled tarpaulins.
Lu points to his home behind the school. It has not collapsed, but has large cracks, likely rendering it uninhabitable.
Uncertainty
Nobody seems to know what is going to happen to them next.
'Are you a volunteer?' asked Ms Gou Ting, as a foreign reporter approached her shack, nothing more than some sheets of plastic strung over a climbing frame and a couple of chairs salvaged from the classrooms.
'The government needs to find us somewhere safe to live. We've only had a bit of help so far.'
Others are more positive.
'The government's reaction has been fine,' said Mr Xie Jiachang, trying to salvage a few pathetic items from his wrecked house.
'We'll tear this place down and build a new house,' he adds, but admits he does not know where the money will come from.
'Maybe we'll get a subsidy,' he adds hopefully. -- REUTERS
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