Tuesday, May 13 2008

TRINIDAD and Tobago’s FIFA vice-president Jack Aiustin Warner is one of several football officials stranded in Chengdu, China, following a massive earthquake which claimed the lives of thousands on Sunday.

Warner experienced the 7.8 magnitude quake while relaxing in his room on the 31st floor of the Sheraton Hotel in Chengdu.

“I saw death,” Warner said in a brief telephone call yesterday.

Warner described the experience as very traumatic.

He is in China as a guest of Asian Football Confederation president Mohamed Bin Hammam for their Vision Asia Project tour of the development of football.

He said the quake occurred during an interval between meetings and hit about 60 miles northwest of Chengdu — a city of 3.75 million — in the middle of the afternoon when classrooms and office towers were full.

Now he and the AFC president and other football officials are in a camp waiting to wing out of Chengdu on a private jet owned by the AFC on their way to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

The official Xinhua News Agency said 8,533 people died in Sichuan province and more than 200 others were killed in three other provinces and the mega-city of Chongqing, in what was described as China’s deadliest quake since 1976.

“I was there dressed just lying on my bed for a couple minutes before going to another meeting and suddenly I felt the room moving left to right. I felt as though my room on the 31st floor was almost going down to road level and back up. This lasted for about five minutes. I was dazed. I was stunned literally.

“Then it just subsided. I didn’t move. I just laid on the bed. Then the phone rang and they told me to just get down. I had to grab my passport and ran down the staircase to the lobby. I collapsed outside because my knees were out after coming down those stairs,” Warner said.

They took us to a nearby football field in which there were thousands of people. We were there for some time before they escorted us to a camp near the hotel and we are here waiting for the airport to re-opened.

“Even today we are feeling after-shocks and people are still very much traumatised.

“After this experience in a large country like China which is supposedly prepared for calamities like this and to see what they are going through now, I am convinced more than ever that Trinidad and Tobago are not prepared for such a disaster.

It is one of the first things I intend to bring up at my next Parliament meeting,” Warner added.

He noted that one of the football stadiums built for the last FIFA Women’s World Cup withstood the earthquake and was being used as a shelter.