Chinese bloggers are fuming with debates on whether some natural phenomenons were showing signs that an earthquake was going to strike China on May 12.
One of the most talk-about phenomenons is the toad migrations which were spotted at a few places across China… I have shared one of the toad migration stories earlier before I knew about the quake.
While the story I shared happened in Jiangsu, a few thousand kilometres away from the quake zone… a similar mass migration also happened at a village in Mianzhu on May 10, one of the places that are affected by the earthquake.
Chinese video – thousands of toads were spotted at a village in Mianzhu
Did the toads sense something coming, or was it merely coincidence and common natural behaviour like some scientists claimed? I am not sure… there are plenty of rooms for speculations obviously.
The freaky thing is that some of the villagers actually expressed their concerns that the toad migration might be an omen that something disastrous might be coming… unfortunately their concerns came true.
The death toll of the quake has risen to 34,000 at the moment. Again, do help in whatever way you can… every bit counts.
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[...] – similar toad migration phenomenon was also noticed in Mianzhu, one of the areas affected by the Chinese [...]
toads or no toads, it’s been pointed out by experts that the Chinese government has had monitoring measures in place long since the 1976 quake and they should have seen the rumblings on the charts. Not to mention the word out now that contractors used sub-standard codes and shoddy building materials to erect buildings as fast as they could to accomodate the recent influx of people into urban areas in return for recieving bribes and kickbacks.
Wow, I’ll be North Korea had no Idea that testing Nukes could wreak this much havoc. Wonder if dropping firecrackers in the basketball we live on could cause this? Yep! I just tried it in my shop. It split the basketball!
i read other news that a small lake of water was gone overnight a few days before the earthquake….. people are linking that as a warning signal for the earthquake.
Now people are panicking in streets because of the latest government warnings about another possible aftershock that they’ve detected. That shows they have the monitoring capacity to detect these things. I can’t help but think that the government may have dropped the ball on that earthquake in regards to having been able to warn people ahead of time. (ie: the CIA and FBI ignoring all the signs that 911 was going to happen. And it’s already been proven there WERE signs). Today’s sizemic technology is perfectly capable of detecting inner-earth sounds and vibrations that indicate an earthquake at the doorstep.
i just want to point out that the bb above me is not the bb who normally comments here. maybe yeinjee can tell by how our wording is different.
sorry if this sounds rude, but can you use another name?
anyway, my mom told me that she heard from some place saying that there’s supposed be to 7 or 8 big disasters that will happen this year.
this is bad, but such things are unpredictable.
the best that humans can do is prepare.
whether the toad migration and the earthquake have any relation or not, i feel that nature is so powerful yet amazing.
there are certainly many things that humans still can’t explain til this day.
Hmm, sorry about that bb. No offense taken. I know it sounds unbelievable, but somehow your username showed in the box and it was too late to delete it by the time I noticed it and I submitted comment. don’t know why that happens sometimes. Something to do maybe with yeinjee’s template on this site. Not sure. Anyway, I noticed it happening some on the other site as well. Strange.
Anyway, true. Nature is an unstoppable force. Be nice if governments and authorities would heed the warnings a little better with the technology that’s available to detect alot of it these days. And of course, obviously it’s not the earthquake that kills, but rather the buildings and infrastructure that collapse unexpectedly on people because of it.
“Freaky” things like this sometimes are really used as basis. And sometimes they are true.
It just freaks me out more that the area where the earthquake centered is in the Tibet area. They got the separation from China literally. That way scary than any other things.
Human knowledge in seismology these days are still quite limited. We might be able to guess when a quake is coming, but lots of the time the guesses could be wrong… I don’t think we have achieved the accuracy yet to predict exactly when a quake is coming.
Some people might argue that it’s better to be safe than sorry; but to think that we would need to move millions of people every time when a quake is predicted… it isn’t really a logical choice with the current accuracy we have.
Agree on the building qualities… too many buildings have collapsed in this quake. While death is unavoidable in natural disasters, thousands of life could be save if the buildings were built with better resistance to shock.
bb… anon#7 was right about the nickname thing; it happens sometimes because of the software that the site is using, and it happen on some other sites that use the same script as well. I am not going into technical details, but it’s just a misunderstanding.
anon#7…no worries, i know you don’t mean it. i just wanted to point it out so that the comments aren’t confusing. i think that each comment here should be respected so that’s why identity should be clear even though it’s just a nickname. but that never happened to me before. it’s pretty cool though =]
just a question on jas’ comment…the quake was really centered in the tibet area? isn’t sichuan a totally different province?
i also wonder if china has the money to construct better buildings in the future. i know they spent a lot for the constructions for the olympics. but will they gain much more profit back? it would definitely take years for the affected areas to fully recover from the quake.
The quake is centered in Sichuan province, which is just next to Tibet.
Better quality buildings? It depends on when China would jump out of their 3rd world mentality. Better buildings equal to higher cost, which means people will have to spend more to buy a house… and the average Chinese aren’t that rich yet.
In future they will have to choose between cheaper cost of living vs the risk of buried under the concrete during disasters… common sense would say that life is more precious than anything else, but sometimes human beings are willing to take some odd risk.
The Chinese government won’t be making much from the Olympic I guess… most of the money will go into the pocket of tourism industry, which in turn would benefit lots of the commoners.
The quake area would take years to fully recover indeed, but compared to the likes of Myanmar… I think China would do better in the rebuilding effort. I don’t think money would be too much an issue for the Chinese government (and with the donations around the world)… and the Chinese do have enough human resources and equipments and a well organised government.
Lets not put Sichuan and Tibet in the same sentence, I think Sharon Stone has caused enough trouble there already. Maybe Tibet is next to Sichuan Prov but it is very far from the centre of the quake. I heard some where that Sichuan Prov is about 4 time bigger than Taiwan.
As mentioned above, China is kinda a 3rd world country. The people there are either very rich or very poor, there is no in between.
To develope a city/town, people see alot of money coming in and this starts the GREED in HUMANs, not all but some and these are the minority that help cause more death than there should have been. Generous people donate money to help build schools, hospitals, homes etc…. and these GREDDY people see a way to TAKE MONEY and with no morals they think cos it has 4 walls and a roof thats it, no safety was entered into their thoughts at all, HENCE alot of the wreck was from schools. Although the China Gov has said it will follow up what happened but what can they do, LIVES HAVE BEEN LOST.
I hope the China Gov will over see that the NEW TOWNS/VILLAGES/SCHOOL etc are and will be safe and no more HUMAN ERROR OR GREED will cause more lives lost.
As YJ mentioned, alot of money will be going to Sichuan, hope they are used properly. The whole world is watching.
EVeryone look up HAARP….weird rainbow clouds were in the sky directly before the quake……the reason it wasnt predicted is that it wasnt a natural earthquake….