In preparing for this year's return visit, I've been spending a lot of time poring over maps. Last year, the only map we had when the earthquake struck was a paperback atlas of the counties of Sichuan Province, in Chinese. It was hard for us to get a sense of the scale of the disaster, and it wasn't until several weeks after the quake that I saw a map showing the actual fault.
This year, I found a fantastic web resource: ReliefWeb, administered by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. The website is a sort of information hub for relief workers, and contains all sorts of reports, documents, and most useful to me, maps and satellite photos. Lots of them, collected from various humanitarian agencies, news websites, NASA, and the US Geological Survey. I searched "China Earthquake May 2008" and came up with these results.
I was also really excited to discover that Google Maps exists in Chinese:
Finding places on the map is a bit challenging, but I was eventually able to locate all the small towns our team visited last year (you have to zoom in pretty far).
Looking at the maps, I'm struck by two things: one, just how widespread the destruction was, and two, how densely populated the area along the fault is. Beichuan, which was destroyed by landslides, is being rebuilt in a new location, but other cities and towns in or near the fault zone will remain in their original spots.
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