How Angel of Sichuan saved school in quake

Students and parents credit that to the man they call Angel Ye. Nervous about the shoddiness of the main school building, Ye scraped together $58,000 to renovate it in the 1990s. He had workers widen concrete pillars and insert iron rods into them. He demanded stronger balcony railings. He demolished a bathroom whose pipes had been weakened by water.

His school in Peace County probably withstood the 8.0-magnitude earthquake because he pushed the county government to upgrade it. Just 20 miles north, the collapse of Beichuan Middle School buried 1,000 students and teachers.

Ye’s tale sheds light on the lax building codes in this mountainous corner of Sichuan Province and what might have been done to address well-known shortcomings. In his case, a personal commitment and a relatively petty amount of cash sufficed to avert tragedy. “We learned a lesson from this earthquake: the standards for schools should have been improved,” Ye, 55, said in an interview. “The standards now are still not enough.”

Ye not only shored up the building’s structure, but also had students and teachers prepare for a disaster. They rehearsed an emergency evacuation plan twice a year. Because of that, students and teachers say, everyone managed to flee in less than two minutes on May 12.

“We’re very thankful,” said Qiu Yanfang, 62, the grandmother of a student, as she sat outside the school knitting a brown sweater. “The principal helped ease the nation’s loss, both the psychological loss and the physical loss.”

The Chinese government estimates that more than 7,000 schoolrooms collapsed in the earthquake. The destruction has prompted grieving parents to take to the streets to demand investigations, and that in turn has become the biggest political challenge to government officials in the aftermath of the earthquake. The police began clamping down this month on the protests.

It has been difficult to establish responsibility for the school collapses partly because it is unclear in many cases which level of government is responsible for the original school construction and for ongoing inspections.

A squat man who speaks in sharp bursts, Ye now lives with his wife in a refugee camp of green tents on the school’s basketball courts. He started working at the school 30 years ago as an English teacher and has taught in every classroom. Some students say he is more playful than the teachers.

The school is one of the largest in Peace County. It has a half-dozen dormitory buildings and two classroom buildings, all five stories or lower. One of the classroom buildings was constructed after 2000, the other between 1983 and 1985. The older one worried Ye when he became principal 12 years ago.

From 1996 to 1999, Ye oversaw a complete overhaul. He said he pestered county officials for money. Eventually the education department gave $58,000. It was a troublesome process because the county was poor and thus tight with money, Ye said, but officials saw the need to ensure the safety of children.

So the renovations began. Most crucial were changes made to concrete pillars and floor panels. Each classroom had four rectangular pillars that were thickened so they jutted from the walls. Up and down the pillars, workers drilled holes and inserted iron reinforcing rods because the original ones were not enough, Ye said. The concrete slab floors were secured to be able to withstand intense shaking.