We're Perfectly Safe

Just wanted to send a quick message to all of you who may have been worried about news of a 7.3 magnitude earthquake that hit our region yesterday morning. The earthquake hit at 6:33am on March 21st along the mountain range that separates Xinjiang from Tibet (the dotted line on the map represents the mountain range and our city is a little further north of Urumqi, the capital city you see on this map). We've received a couple of e-mails and even a phone call from a friend in Japan (Yoshi!) making sure that we are safe. The good news is that we didn't feel a bit of the earthquake where we are in Karamay, even though we did wish we could have felt something. I did some research on the maps we have here and found that our province of Xinjiang, the largest in China, is so big that the distance between our city and this mountain range is the same as the distance between Dallas and Nashville. There's very little chance we could have felt this earthquake or its aftershocks, even though it was very intense. In fact, China's most devastating earthquake occurred back in 1976 and was about the same intensity as this earthquake here in Xinjiang. The difference? The '76 quake was centered near Beijing where an estimated quarter of a million people passed away compared to the reported 261 deaths here in the sparsely populated Xinjiang.

Another interesting fact to note: news of this earthquake hit foreign press yesterday morning at 9am, two and a half hours after the actual earthquake. The first article to hit Chinese news arrived 24 hours later.

We'll be posting more pictures early next week. Thanks for your concern and we hope you all have a wonderful Easter!