By Hu Yinan and Zhang Haizhou (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-05-16 07:21

BEICHUAN, Sichuan - What remains of Beichuan County convulsed once again on Thursday when the latest of 3,000 aftershocks cruelly struck at 12:54 pm, three days after Monday's initial devastation.

Amid the ruins of once lively streets, where rescue workers, soldiers and armed police officers raced the clock to save survivors trapped amid smoking debris, everyone stayed put during the tremor.

Paul Schuster, a Canadian medical worker with Heart to Heart International's office in Chengdu, waited with bated breath for local rescuers to signal from the rescue site.

Each wave from them indicated a sign of life and a life-saving task for his nine-member team.

"Our cooperation with the military and the local rescue force is as best as it can be under the circumstances," Schuster told China Daily, while keeping one eye trained on rescuers.

Here, in a basin surrounded by mountains, heavy rainfall and constant landslides have thwarted experienced soldiers and medical staff, and rendered the best rescue equipment useless.

Initially four soldiers at a time from PLA Unit 77136, the first rescue team to arrive in Beichuan, carried survivors out of the rubble to the nearest ambulance, traversing up and down a 70-degree slope that only die-hard trekkers would tackle.

But as their feet grew heavy in sticky mud after days of rain, up to 20 soldiers were needed to relay each stretcher down to safety.

For members of the Heart-to-Heart International team, working with the Chengdu Red Cross, all they could do was wait.

Just when hopes were fading a triumphant wave indicated a cry had been heard from the ruins of a department store.

Schuster's team quickly raced there alongside local rescue workers, two armed police boys, four special police from Chongqing and fire fighters from as far afield as Dalian in Northeast China's Liaoning province.

Heart-rending cries could be heard from the bottom of what used to be a four-story building.

Armed police officers scratched at the debris as an American doctor pointed his flashlight into the lifeless darkness.

But 10 minutes of frantic efforts came to an abrupt end when it was realized the cries were in fact those of a trapped dog.

The crowd then quickly dispersed, fleeing to another site two blocks away, where four people were confirmed alive at the base of a three-story building.

But still haunted by the cries, the young policeman refused to give up.

"What if it really is a baby crying?" the fellow - in his late teens - murmured while searching a narrow space full of clothes, body parts and the smell of death.

Two blocks away amid a mash of rubble, broken glass and blooded corpses, tireless rescuers were painstakingly trying to reach the confirmed survivors.

Unfortunately for those survivors, no escape passage was available after the entire building disintegrated under the weight of two adjacent structures that toppled onto it.

Rescuers were still yet to reach the stranded even after 20 minutes of anguished digging.

"We must use a crane to remove the stones first," one said, temporarily forgetting the impossibility of such a prospect in the short term.

All heavy equipment had been stranded about 5 km from the scene after roads were gouged and buckled by the force of Monday's quake.

As the group of rescuers withdrew from the heart of the disaster, a long line of PLA soldiers, each armed with picks and spades, replaced them.

A local police officer said roughly 40,000 to 50,000 PLA troops, police, militia, rescue workers as well as volunteers from right around the country were mobilized to help Beichuan.