China earthquake: Blogs claim 'swarming toads' warned of Sichuan disaster - Telegraph
Chinese internet blogs and media are awash with claims that “swarming” toads, falling water levels and the erratic behaviour of zoo animals were portents to the country’s worst earthquake in 30 years.
The first sign came about three weeks ago, when a large volume of water suddenly disappeared from a pond in Enshi, Hubei province, around 350 miles east of the epicentre of the May 12 quake in Sichuan, according to media reports.
Three days before the earthquake, thousands of toads roamed the streets of Mianzhu, a hard-hit city where at least 2,000 people have been reported killed.
Mianzhu residents feared the toads were a sign of an approaching natural disaster, but a local forestry bureau official said it was normal, the Huaxi Metropolitan newspaper reported on May 10, two days before the earthquake.
“It’s obviously an omen. Officials say that there were environmental factors behind it, but that just goes to show how ignorant they are,” said one blog posting. Another posting said: “These experts are rubbish.”
The day of the earthquake, zebras banged their heads against their enclosure door at the zoo in Wuhan, 600 miles east of the epicentre, according to a newspaper in the city. Five minutes before the quake hit, dozens of peacocks started screeching.
Zoo officials told the Wuhan newspaper that the behaviour was probably a sign that an earthquake would happen.
“If the seismological bureau were professional enough they could have predicted the earthquake 10 days earlier, when several thousand cubic meters of water disappeared within an hour in Hubei, but the bureau there dismissed it,” one commentator wrote on a Chinese internet chat site.
