For parents of quake victims, grief turns to anger

By John Ruwitch

WUFU, China (Reuters) - Nearly every building in the tiny rural town of Wufu withstood the earthquake that shook China on Monday -- except the New Number Two Primary School which collapsed, killing some 300 children.

Now grieving parents, many of whom dug through rubble with their hands in a frantic effort to save their children, are venting their anger at local officials who they claim knew the building was substandard.

Jumbled mounds of concrete and brick are all that remain of the three-storey schoolhouse that caved in just moments before afternoon classes were to begin. Notebooks, backpacks, clothes and a tin lunch box litter the picked-over rubble.

The scene is repeated in towns and cities across the quake-damaged section of Sichuan, where more than 50,000 people may have died, including hundreds of students crushed when their schools collapsed.

The Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development has ordered local authorities to investigate.

Bi Kaiwei's 13-year-old daughter, Yuexing, was in her second-storey sixth-grade classroom when the walls and ceiling crashed down in the quake.

"Our child wasn't killed by the earthquake. She and the others were killed by a derelict building," he said. "The officials knew it was unsafe.

"Look at that one there," Bi said, pointing diagonally across from where the school used to stand to a yellowish corner building spared of damaged. "We live there. It was built in 1982. It's still standing."

Premier Wen Jiabao earlier this week stood symbolically on the rubble of another collapsed school in Sichuan and told students trapped below that they would be saved.

But that was little consolation in Wufu, where residents say the local government hasn't even announced the number of children killed in the school.

The loss of so many children is particularly poignant in China, where the government's family planning policies, aimed at curbing population growth, mean that most have only one child.

FRANTIC EFFORTS

When the New Number Two Primary School fell, parents, relatives and friends of pupils rushed to the site.

Sang Jun arrived about 20 minutes after the earthquake to look for his son. "There were already five people digging," said Sang. He jumped in to help.

His arms and legs, like Bi's and other parents here, are now scarred with scrapes and bruises from the frantic efforts to pull apart the rubble and get to their kids below.  Continued...