Risk register · entry
Q2 · The CoconutSichuan earthquake
Known quake zone; tofu-dreg schools turned a tail into a certainty.
The rare, high-impact event that was always coming, and was always going to be called unforeseeable afterwards.
Why this quadrant
The fault was mapped and the shaking was survivable in a building put up properly. What made the loss concentrate on schools was that the same corners were cut in thousands of them, so buildings that should have failed independently failed together. More than 7,000 classrooms came down.
The record
- Magnitude 7.9 (Mw, USGS) / 8.0 (Ms, official Chinese scale)certain
- May 12, 2008, 14:28 local time; epicenter in Wenchuan County, about 80 km WNW of Chengducertain
- Official toll: approx. 69,200 dead (69,226-69,227 depending on source/date), about 18,000 missing, about 374,000 injuredcertain
- More than 7,000 school classrooms/schoolrooms collapsedcertain
- Official student death toll announced May 2009: 5,335 dead, 546 disabledcertain
- Early, incomplete vice-governor tally cited 19,065 student deaths before later downward revisionuncertain
- Ai Weiwei's citizens' investigation independently verified roughly 4,850-5,390 student names, figure varies by snapshot date across 2009uncertain
- Juyuan Middle School: official count 280 dead; independent investigators documented over 300likely
- Xinjian Primary School: over 200 pupils killedlikely
- Estimated economic loss: 845.1 billion yuan (approx. US$130 billion)likely
- Activists Huang Qi, Liu Shaokun, and Tan Zuoren detained in connection with documenting school collapsescertain
Sources
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