Wenchuan earthquake

I was in a meeting in our Chengdu office, 100k from the epicentre, when the Wenchuan earthquake hit. We immediately knew what it was..the building started shaking and people ran for the doors. I was trying to remember what you were meant to do in an earthquake. I remembered something about standing in a doorway or getting under a desk - but couldn't remember if that was for a earthquake or a tornado.

We started to evacuate the building. The ground was still shaking but you could walk without difficulty and, for no reason I can explain, I never thought the building was going to collapse. We were in a low rise - top floor of a 5 storey building. I walked out onto the roof terrace and looked across the city. Everything seemed ok - no columns of smoke, no signs of collapsed buildings - but the ground was still shaking - it had been at least 5 minutes by now. I walked down the emergency stairs to see the streets full of people. Everyone was very anxious - they were all trying to phone their families and no calls were going through. The shaking finally stopped.

All the buildings around us in the Chengdu hi-tech zone were still standing. We told the staff to go home and find their families. I went back into the office to collect my briefcase and someone dropped me off at the hotel, a few minutes away. But they weren't letting anyone in - they were worried about aftershocks - so I sat down on a bench in front of the lobby and fired up the laptop to see if I could get a wireless connection to the internet through the hotel. Stupid thing to do in hindsight..sitting in front of a 28 floor glass building waiting for a possible aftershock.

The BBC and CNN websites were showing the first news reports. Four reported dead. After about an hour it went up to 100. A crowd of young Chinese gathered round me and we looked at the news websites together. Still the hotel wouldn't let us in. They moved everyone to an outdoor garden a hundred metres away. They brought out tables and chairs and bottles of water. They were preparing for a long wait.

I sat down at a table with a couple of Americans in town on business and a Chinese couple who lived in Chengdu and had come to visit friends in the neighbourhood. They were waiting for the traffic to calm down before heading home. We chatted and exchanged stories. Their daughter was attending an international school and they were planning on her going to university in England. He brought some beers from his car and we talked and joked - me struggling in Mandarin and him in English.

By now there were at least 500 people in the garden. Some were playing cards, others eating and drinking. At the table next to us was a family in fluffy hotel bath robes - presumably enjoying a swim when the quake struck. Occasionally, the ground shook with a mild tremor. Everyone would stop and wait. It would pass and we would carry on. It was a bizarre situation. Sitting outside in the warm evening air, drinking beer, eating hotel-supplied pot noodles - there was a real buzz in the air that I can't explain. A mix of tension and excitement - after all we had experienced the earthquake, we were safe.

It would be at least 24 hours before the reports started coming out of Wenchuan and the true scale of the devastation and horrific loss of life started to become clear. While I had been sitting in that garden getting irritated that they wouldn't let us back into the hotel, tens of thousands had died in the mountains nearby.

I saw a map of the earthquake zone later that week on the BBC web site. The fault line ran northeast/southwest through the epicentre. Chengdu - a city of 10m people - was just 100kms to the west of the fault line. I realised then just how lucky I had been and, unbelievable as it was, how much worse this tragedy could have been.