Oregon Public Broadcasting

Over the weekend, rescue crews continued digging out survivors from the massive earthquake that struck China's Sichuan province last week. Donations have poured into Oregon's charitable groups.

Many people with ties in China are still trying to get information. April Baer spoke with some of those people and she and Allison Frost filed this report.

The Chinese city of Chengdu, where the earthquake hit hardest is on the other side of the globe. But a few Oregonians might find some aspects of the city familiar. 

It's mountainous and sits along a famous and well-traveled river.  The weather is often cloudy, although it's much hotter than Oregon in the summer.

Chengdu is home to five times as many people as the Portland metro area, and many of them are still unaccounted for. And that has plenty of people in Oregon, plenty worried.

Amy Potthast is one of them. She's a former Peace Corp volunteer who was in China from 1998 to 2000. She's sitting in front of her lap top, hour after hour.

Amy Potthast: "Right now I'm looking at the listserve of the returned Peace Corp volunteer group...."

She lived for about a year in Chengdu. She hasn't been able to get in touch with many of the people she knew. So she relies on that list serv for details.

Amy Potthast: "He says downtown Manyung has been quite messy. No water for 40 hours, which made bottled water almost all sold out in all supermarkets. No electricity, which made Manyung almost complete dark. Mangyung is a pretty big city, I think maybe a million people."

Sheldon Ren: "The hardest hit areas especially some remote counties around the Sichuan Province just make me speechless."

Sheldon Ren's been online a lot, too. He's a financial advisor from Hillsboro, and has traveled extensively in China for work. What bothers him is thinking about the places in rural Sichuan Province, where heavy equipment is difficult to move in.

Sheldon Ren: "Especially when I see all those school building, factory buildings completely being leveled."

The recovery and rebuilding effort may directly affect Oregonians whose work takes them to China. Sichuan's been something of a boom region, a gateway to rural places that have undergone explosive development.

There's one corporation in particular that's been hard hit. Intel has a plant outside of Chengdu. About 1600 people work there and they make twenty percent of the company's chips. The plant was evacuated and offline for several days.

A lot of Oregonians have been online trying to keep tabs on the disaster.

Julia Rutig  recently graduated from collage. She works in the Tea House in the Chinese Classical Garden in downtown Portland. She spent two years studying abroad in China, and was anxious for details about a friend in Chengdu.

She found out through Facebook that her friend's OK. But she says she can't stop thinking about the tens of thousands of others who may be trapped.

Julia Rutig: "My first thought was omigosh how do these people get out of these buildings, because there's this enormous crowding tendency to get on the bus, to get in the subway, in a panic situation like that, I can't imagine what it would gave been like, to get out onto the crowded streets, and what that would have been like."

Those with family in Sichuan province are especially worried. Tao Yang is a Portland scientist grew up very close to the epicenter of the quakes. Her sister is a doctor in Chengdu, and wasn't harmed. But she has other worries.

Tao Yang: "OK you know, my parents, who are over 75 years old"

Yang's sister has been working long hours caring for quake victims. She says it would be hard to overestimate the stress and the need right now.

Tao Yang: "You know my sister said everybody want to do something. She have no time to take care of my parents."

Her sister tells her their parents' apartment is sound, and for that, she's relieved. Yang has donated money for relief. She'd like all  Oregonians to consider doing the same, and if they pray, to pray for the Chinese people.

We also got help with this story from our Public Insight Network, a new community of OPB listeners sharing their experience. To find out more or to sign up, go to OPB.org/publicinsight.