By Zhu Zhe (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-05-19 07:31

HANWANG, Sichuan: "We're all Chinese."

This is the answer Ou Chin-der, leader of a Taiwan Red Cross rescue unit, gave when asked why his team had come to Sichuan.

"I believe that people from Taiwan are more anxious than people from any other region in the world after the deadly earthquake hit Sichuan," said the leader of the first team to arrive from across the Taiwan Straits.

The 22-member search and rescue squad, including a black dog named Bailey, landed in Chengdu directly from Taipei on Friday night and headed to the heavily hit town of Hanwang on Saturday to help save survivors.

With them they brought advanced search equipment such as life detectors and cutting and lifting machines, not to mention a wealth of experience.

Ou, a former deputy mayor of Taipei, commanded search and rescue operations after a devastating earthquake struck the city on September 21, 1999.

Apart from Ou and deputy director Chen Ta-cheng, a Red Cross executive, firefighters and veteran Red Cross search and rescue personnel comprise the rest of the team.

Upon their arrival in Hanwang, two team leaders were quickly briefed before they led their members to different sites where more survivors were thought to have been trapped.

"We're racing against time. Although hopes for survivors are getting slim now, we'll still try our best," Ou said.

Dressed in orange and black uniforms, one team rushed to a collapsed four-story hospital dormitory where three people were believed to be alive beneath the rubble.

Locals said at least five bodies had been carried out of the site in the past few days.

Rescuers first used sound detectors to listen for any murmurs or slight movements below.

Whenever they heard something, their faces lit up with hope.

"There's a sound... ka...ka...here!," a rescuer surnamed Ma exclaimed.

He then scaled the debris carefully - to ensure no more collapses - and used life and sonar detectors to confirm the presence of a survivor.

But after 40 painstaking minutes, he forlornly concluded that the sound was actually the vibration of a mobile phone.

"It's often like this. Hope and disappointment appear in turn," Ma said. "But even where there's 1 percent hope, we'll pay 100 percent effort."

The town of Hanwang in Mianzhu city was one of the most severely hit by last Monday's quake.

At least 4,000 people are confirmed dead and hundreds are still buried there, according to incomplete figures from the local disaster relief center.

Ou said that with so much time already passed, the hope for survivors could be lost within two or three days.

"Then, we may need to have another team from Taiwan to help with epidemic prevention, allocation of the homeless as well as reconstruction work," he said.

"We've all prepared for that."

Ou said he considered the mainland's reaction to the Sichuan quake as "pretty fast and effective".

"What we see in Hanwang today is in pretty good order given the emergency and huge relief work," he said.

But some rescuers suggested mainland volunteers, especially those who subsequently needed to be rescued themselves, should be given essential training.

"Many of us are volunteers," Ma Jiun-roung, a rescuer, said. "I'm a PE teacher, but all of us have taken training in rescue or emergency medical work before we could get the license to be a volunteer rescuer."

"Too many volunteers without any experience or training could sometimes cause additional trouble in disaster-hit areas," he said.

"A principle in our work is that a rescuer should never be the one to be rescued."