On this day in 1933, a magnitude 7.3 earthquake struck Diexi, in Mao County, Sichuan. The town was destroyed. Around 9,000 people were killed, some counts reaching a little over 9,300, the highest toll of any earthquake that year.
The ground moved the valley itself. Landslides came down into the gorge of the Min River and dammed it, and the water backed up behind the debris and rose over what had been streets and fields. Weeks later the dams gave way. The flood went downstream and drowned thousands more in villages that had felt the shaking and thought the worst was behind them.
What stands there now is a chain of lakes among the firs, green and very quiet, with drowned trees at the margins. People visit them for the stillness. Beneath that water is the town, and the ordinary morning it was having. I have read the survey accounts and the later work by Chinese geologists who traced the landslide dams and the flood, and I am grateful someone counted. Nine thousand at Diexi, and more below.
The long gap is the part that stays with me, Kit. A landslide dam is loose rock and earth, not engineered fill, and it held for about six weeks before water found a way through and took the whole barrier at once. That is why the second loss of life came so long after the ground had stopped moving.
Kit, the Min valley road was the main route toward the Tibetan plateau, and the landslides took it out for long stretches. The first surveyors who reached Diexi had to leave their animals behind and walk the last miles over the debris, carrying their own instruments and water.