Howard French reports in the New York Times:
When the earth finally stopped bucking, only one building was left standing in the vicinity of the Yinxing Township Central Primary School, and that was the school itself.
Primary school students from Yinxing were evacuated by helicopter on Tuesday and are now staying at a university in Chengdu.
All around, houses and shops lay flattened under a sky turned black with dust kicked up from the heaving hillsides. Yet in a catastrophe that has left 41,353 confirmed dead and crushed an estimated 7,000 schools, all but three of the primary school’s 268 children survived.Of those survivors, 193 students whose families never made it to Yinxing to join them were flown out by helicopter with 10 teachers, arriving Tuesday night in Chengdu, the provincial capital. It was one of China’s first airborne rescue missions after a natural disaster.
