[quote=“Stray Dog”]I was asleep, in bed, on the 3rd floor in Taipei. My bed started shaking VIOLENTLY, stuff started to fall off of my bookshelves (in the pitch dark) and I thought the ceiling was going to start cracking and collapsing. It was pretty damned scary.
Before that, I thought earthquakes were fun.
I was living on the same street as the hotel that collapsed in Taipei. As we ran to a nearby park to get away from tall buildings, other people were pointing in the direction of the hotel and telling us how they’d seen fire and smoke soon after the earthquake hit. I visited the site the next day and watched with thousands of others as the fire brigade used cranes and buckets to pull out bodies - some alive; some not.
Two days later, a friend and I rented a van and helped ship emergency supplies from Taipei City Hall into the hardest-hit areas. We were given signs to put in our front and back windows so we could use the hard shoulder without being stopped by police - bloody glad about that, because the motorway was chocka all the way.
We stopped at a small town on the way, and it was incredible sight; buildings all around were tilting. Some had only the bottom two or three floors collapsed, often crushing cars parked on front. Roads were buckled and bridges were destroyed, and we found ourselves having to go off-road in areas where emergency volunteers had been killed just the day before. Every time we stopped, we would be approached by people asking for food and water, or tents and blankets.
We ended up at a school, where a makeshift camp had been set up for those whose homes had been destroyed. We unloaded most of the goods and entertained the kids for a while, who were all in remarkably good spirits considering their plight. We were asked if we’d like to stay and help out some more, so we drove to a nearby stadium and helped a group of soldiers and civilians unload trucks as they arrived. Huge mountains of blankets, tents, water, and noodles soon formed.
We worked into the night, and in the early hours were taken to a carpeted office to get some sleep before sun up, when we would be taking supplies up into the epicentre. We slept surprisingly well before being woken by the sunlight streaming into the room. We were given coffee and bread, which we devoured happily while watching helicopters land, load up, and take off in rapid succession. I felt like I was in MAS*H.
We were given a guide/translator and told to follow another vehicle. The journey was treacherous, and seemed to take forever, as the roads were half collapsed and extremely narrow, or half-blocked by boulders, particularly on the climb up into the mountains. We had to cut our mission short, as we were informed upon arrival at a police station that the road ahead was completely unnavigable, and we were forced to unload our goods and store them there until those trapped at a higher elevation could be reached.
Seeing all that devastation was something I will never forget. I grew up thinking that buildings were our castles, and protected us from harm. BUt the buildings we saw had turned into death traps, and we could only imagine the lives lost as we passed building after building that had collapsed or toppled over. But the resilience of the people was incredible, and I was in awe of how they were able to get on with life so soon after the disaster.
I still have the photos from that trip, and really must get them uploaded before I lose them.
Here’s hoping we don’t see another like that in our lifetime. That was scary! 
[/quote]
Dude,
Just when I thought your benevolance was restricted to creatures with four legs… 
and that was some uninhabited place that wasn’t worth worrying about. Of course I thought to myself that if buildings were falling in Taipei and the epicenter was in Nantou, then Taichung had probably been reduced to rubble. 
