XINING, Oct. 28 (Xinhua) -- Seven-year-old Tenzin Wangso was curled up on his dormitory bed, too frightened to move, when his math teacher Karma Tenzin found him.
The teacher grabbed a quilt, wrapped it around the boy and carried him downstairs to the playground. He then rushed back into the building to make sure no children had been left behind.
A 7.0-magnitude earthquake had struck Baqen County in southwest China's Xizang Autonomous Region at 10:33 p.m. on Oct. 22, sending strong tremors through neighboring Jieduo Township of Yushu Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in Qinghai Province in northwest China. Most of the 120 boarding students at the township's rural boarding school were already asleep when the quake hit.
Within about three minutes after the quake struck, all 120 had reached the playground, according to the school's surveillance footage. None was injured.
The school, more than 4,200 meters above sea level on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, had been practicing for such an emergency for 16 years.
Chime Tsering, principal of Jieduo Township Central Boarding School, still remembers the morning of April 14, 2010.
He had arrived as vice principal just a month earlier. Back then, the school consisted of two rows of single-story buildings, one for classrooms and the other for dormitories.
When a 7.1-magnitude earthquake struck Yushu that morning, teachers and students were attending morning study sessions. Nearly 2,700 people died across the region.
"We had no experience dealing with an earthquake. Everyone was terrified," Chime Tsering recalled.
Teachers and students made it to the playground. Subsequent inspections found cracks in both buildings, which were later demolished and rebuilt.
This experience prompted the school to rethink its emergency procedures. As local education authorities called for more earthquake drills, Chime Tsering and his colleagues began working out how to get students to safety.
At first, they simply designated evacuation routes. Early drills took six or seven minutes. As teachers identified problems and revised the procedures, that duration fell to three or four minutes, and eventually to under three.
They also began holding drills at different times of day, including at night, when children would have to be woken and guided out of their dormitories.
Teachers were given specific responsibilities: waking students, directing them at stairwells and guiding them through exits.
The school now holds emergency drills at least once a month, covering both earthquakes and fires, with two or three nighttime exercises each semester. Its most recent earthquake drill was held roughly two weeks before the Oct. 22 quake.
The dormitory building has two designated evacuation routes and the teaching building has three. Each teacher is also assigned a group of 13 students to look after in daily school life, as well as specific rooms or classes to oversee during emergencies.
Karma Tenzin, who has taught math at the school for three years, was grading homework when the tremors began.
"The ground was shaking violently, and the tables and chairs were moving," he said. It was the strongest earthquake he had felt in recent years.
He and other teachers headed for the student dormitories.
Karma Tenzin was responsible for checking five rooms in the boys' dormitory. Moving from one room to the next, he was most worried about younger pupils, who might be slow to react or fall during the evacuation.
Among them was Tenzin Wangso, the first-grader he carried to safety. The boy had started school only in September.
Another teacher, Pema Wanggyal, also carried a first-grader out of the building.
On the playground, children gathered in coats and quilts while teachers checked attendance and comforted those who were frightened.
The school put up temporary tents that night. Parents began collecting their children the next day.
Most of the school buildings had been rebuilt after the 2010 earthquake. They remained largely intact, although fine cracks appeared in some walls.
"Only through repeated practice can we stay calm when something really happens and protect every child," Chime Tsering said.
The school has more than 170 students, most of them children of local herding families. Many live in remote pastoral areas where mobile phone reception is unreliable.
With in-person classes temporarily suspended, teachers began visiting students' homes on Oct. 25 to inform parents of the arrangements and find out whether the children had the equipment and internet access needed for online lessons.
"We have to visit families one by one," Karma Tenzin noted. "We also need to understand their circumstances before deciding how online teaching can be arranged."
For him, the greatest relief was that the drills had worked when they were needed, and that every child had come through the earthquake unharmed. ■
