Amid Death, a Tale of Triumph

By VALERIE REITMAN

Sept. 25, 1999 12 AM PT

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

TALI, Taiwan — Doctors here were hailing it as a miracle: A 6-year-old boy emerged alive Friday after spending 87 hours trapped in a crawl space between apartment floors sandwiched by this week’s massive earthquake.

But just down the street, a father who had begged rescuers to find his 19-year-old daughter in a collapsed building was changing his plea: Now he demanded that they give up.

She had still been alive on Wednesday, he knew; he had heard her voice. But two days had gone by, and he was fearful of the risks to rescuers in a building that was leaning at a perilous 20-degree angle and tipping farther by the minute.

It was a day filled far more with tragedy than with joy as hopes for finding survivors were all but gone. The national death count from Tuesday’s magnitude 7.6 quake had climbed to nearly 2,000 as of today, with about 8,500 injured and nearly 300 people still trapped in the wreckage. The death toll was lower than Friday’s figure, which officials attributed to adjacent counties having reported some of the same victims.

This small city in the island’s interior had largely been spared by the quake, except for one devastated section where tall apartment buildings had fallen, some crashing onto adjacent buildings. Most of the 88 victims who had died in the city as of Thursday had perished in these downed apartments.

Many others had been trapped inside, and local residents said they received little assistance from the government for the first critical days as relief went to harder-hit areas of central Taiwan. Soldiers who did help out had little equipment, the residents said.

But all that changed Friday when much of the country was glued to televisions watching the unfolding rescue of the 6-year-old boy. Could they get him out alive? people wondered. Even Taiwanese President Lee Teng-hui showed up at the rescue scene.

Hopes were limited, since other survivors found in the preceding hours had emerged alive from the wreckage only to die later of injuries. Doctors say it is difficult to survive more than 72 hours without water.

A crew of South Korean rescuers, using a long, thin pole-like device with a video camera and microphone on the end, had heard a weak voice in the bowels of the building Friday morning.

With the video camera, they could see at least three people lying in front of an infant. But there was lots of concrete between the Koreans and the people trapped below.

When rescuers asked the boy his name, “Chang Zing-hung” came the reply. He told them he could move his arms but not his legs. Asked if anyone else was there, he said it was too dark to see his parents or sisters.

One of the boy’s aunts was located, and she began talking to him through the pole’s microphone. The boy told her he was thirsty and asked for a popular brand of flavored water.

He also asked why he was there, and said it was dark and he couldn’t see his father. “He’s out here waiting for you,” the aunt lied. By then, it appeared certain that his parents were dead, along with at least one of the two sisters trapped with him and another of his aunts.

Workers labored all afternoon with shovels to reach him, too afraid that the floors would collapse if they used heavy equipment. The family’s apartment had been on the second floor, but the force of the quake had pushed it into the basement.

At 5:20 p.m, rescuers carried the boy out. Though terrified, he appeared to have suffered only minor abrasions. He was kept overnight in the hospital nevertheless.

Swiss, Austrian and German rescuers continued to work away, trying to find out if his infant sister was still alive. At 7:35 p.m., Taiwanese rescue workers lit a few bundles of incense sticks and waved them as they walked back into the building, a sign that more dead had been located. Two more bodies--adults, though it was unclear which family members--had been reached. It would be several hours before the bodies could be pulled out.

Around 11 p.m., the rescue crews indicated that the baby was alive.

Their hopes were short-lived. About 3 a.m. today, the bodies of the boy’s two sisters--including the newborn--were pulled from the building, lifeless.

Seeing all the attention devoted to the boy, relatives of people trapped in the building down the street begged rescuers to come help them. Survivors who managed to get out of the building during the quake said they had been largely responsible for pulling out 69 other people. Another building had fallen onto the apartment complex, and several floors of apartments had been crushed together.

Aftershocks, however, had caused the apartment building to tilt substantially more, area residents said, making rescuing the two dozen people they believed to be still trapped in the rubble more hazardous. The local government had told them to stop working until rescue teams arrived.

In particular, they were searching for 19-year-old kindergarten teacher Sun Zou-chun. They knew she had been alive at least a day after the quake because she had briefly answered her father’s call Wednesday from his home in northern Taiwan to her cell phone. She had murmured a weak hello, then was cut off.

Sun had lived on the fourth floor, in an area of the apartment complex that was pinned under a section of the other building. Her father, Sun Hse-ping, believed that a couple who lived on the third floor were also trapped in the rubble.

First, Japanese crews tried to go into the twisted wreckage from the top of the rubble. No luck.

Then, a German squad took German shepherds into the wreckage of the basement area. There was no reaction from the dogs, who are trained to sniff out living humans but ignore dead bodies.

One German worker strapped his dog, Tim, around his neck and carried him up a ladder to an upper floor. The hulking debris looked as if it could give way at any second.

At 9 p.m., about two hours after the rescue teams began to search the site, Tim started to bark excitedly in the mangled wreckage of the second floor. It turned out to be the dog’s own panic cry: He had lost sight of his burly German master.

The Germans advised the Koreans, who followed them in to try electronic detection, that they were risking their lives for what could amount to a hopeless cause.

But the father insisted that the daughter and the couple were there, and the Koreans decided to take the chance. One agile worker climbed a precariously sloping floor up to the section of the building where the father said his daughter’s apartment should be, and entered through a window to look around. The Germans went back into the basement with their dogs to try again.

All the while, the building seemed to be tilting more, and word came that there was a sizable amount of water leaking from a sewage pipe into the basement, further weakening the building’s foundation.

The Koreans emerged and said they had seen no bodies. Moreover, they told the father of the missing teacher, it appeared that the furniture in the unit they had been searching was from a fifth-floor apartment, not the fourth floor, based on descriptions they had been given.

They said the only way to look further was to go in through the elevator shaft, which appeared very dangerous. But they offered to do it--if the father wanted them to.

“There is no need to risk your life,” the father said.

“If you really want us to go, we’ll go,” responded one of the Koreans, who like the rest of his crew works for TAP Electronics Co., the manufacturer of the scanning device they used.

But the father told them: It’s time to give up.

“I gave up hope that she was alive,” the father said. “If you can’t have her alive, it means you have to give up. If she’s really at the end of her life, there’s nothing else I can do.”

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How to Help

These aid agencies are among the many accepting contributions for assistance to victims of the earthquake in Taiwan. A more comprehensive list is available on The Times’ Web site: http://pyxis.nohib.com./quakeaid.

Adventist Development and Relief Agency Taiwan Earthquake Relief Fund

P.O. Box 4289

Silver Spring, MD 20914

Tel: (800) 424-2372

https://www.adra.org

AmeriCares Taiwan Earthquake Relief Fund

161 Cherry St.

New Canaan, CT 06840

Tel: (800) 486-HELP

https://www.americares.org

Operation USA Taiwan Earthquake Relief Fund

8320 Melrose Ave., Suite 200