Zhao Cunfu, a teacher at the Lirang Village Elementary School in Chongqing, said by telephone that he was sitting in his office when he suddenly felt dizzy. Stumbling into the hallway, he found a crowd of first-graders crying and frantic.
"The children panicked. They were pushing one another. They were very small. It was easy for them to get hurt," Zhao said. A dormitory at the school collapsed and many classrooms were damaged.
In Chengdu, a city of 11 million, witnesses described mass panic when the quake hit.
"Cars were bouncing along the street. Everyone came rushing out of their buildings," said Chris Fay, a British bar owner, in a telephone interview over the howl of sirens in the background.
"It lasted a long time, maybe four or five minutes," said Daisy Cang, a bookstore employee in Chengdu, who said she was alerted to the quake when the beer cans stacked in her refrigerator toppled over.
Fearful of aftershocks, residents poured into the streets. Chinese state television showed footage of office workers with their laptops at an outdoor cafe, while others lounged around the flower beds, appearing to enjoy a rare break on a spring day.
But the government-run television showed none of the more gruesome scenes from the earthquake, and glimpses of the devastation came only from short items offered by the official news agencies.
Overnight, many camped out in parks and on the street for fear that aftershocks could knock down more buildings.
It was reported that two chemical plants collapsed in Shifang, northeast of the epicenter. One of them spilled 80 tons of toxic ammonia. The death toll in the town was reported at 600, with hundreds more trapped in the rubble.
In Dujiangyan city, where the middle school collapsed, photographs circulated on Internet news sites showed limbs poking out of the wreckage. As crews using construction cranes tried to lift slabs from the upper floors that had pancaked onto lower floors, horrified parents stood calling out to their children, many of them eighth- and ninth-graders. The official New China News Agency described children crying for help while workers wrote the names of the confirmed dead on a blackboard. Chinese children undergo intensive earthquake training, but it is unclear how many managed to escape.
"Some had jumped out of the window and a few others ran down the stairs that did not collapse," Gao Shangyuan, a volunteer rescue worker at the school, was quoted as telling the news agency.
