Evacuation.
We felt the Szechuan earthquake here this afternoon at about 2:45. Actually, I was at the dentist and didn’t feel anything, so when I came out, I was puzzled about why so many people were standing around, looking up at the buildings. At first I thought it was a fire or someone threatening to jump, but I didn’t see anything. Then I asked someone, and they said there was an earthquake! For the next half hour or so I stood around in the park on Zunyi Lu with several thousand people who had been evacuated from their offices or didn’t dare go home. At one point, some clouds moved quickly in the sky, in back of a tall building, giving it the appearance of swaying. Some people panicked, and ther was a stampede of like one hundred people who ran in the opposite direction. One girl fell down. Nothing else bad happened here, other than not being able to get a phone connection because too many people were dialing out at the same time. Not everyone was so lucky, though. Apparently several thousand people were killed (or are currently missing) close to the epicenter.