From China, Disaster Caught in a Wedding Lens

Some pretty amazing before-during-and-after photographs of the devastating May 12 earthquake in China have surfaced, photos that exist because of the timing of the quake-in midafternoon, when several newlywed couples happened to be having their wedding photos taken near the town of Bailu. The Associated Press reports that the photographer, Wang Qiang, was set up outside the century-old French missionary church there, no longer in use but still popular as a romantic backdrop for wedding portraits. He had already taken some shots and was waiting for the couple he was photographing to change clothes when the quake struck; he instinctively started recording what happened as the church started to crumble:
“I shouted to people, ‘Run! Run!’ ” Wang said Thursday night by phone. “The ground shook and we couldn’t see anything in the dust.”Most of the church “collapsed in 10 seconds,” said Wang, who lives in Chengdu, capital of hard-hit Sichuan province.One of Wang’s photos shows a half-cracked, half-shattered church facade with its ruins spilling from the front door. Clouds of dust from the magnitude-7.9 earthquake float in the air.When the dust settled, everyone stood up and realized they were all safe, Wang said. His photos show them standing in disbelief, covering their mouths, wiping dust from their hair. A bride from another photo shoot pulls up her dress, revealing sneakers.
Capping the surreal experience, the wedding parties wound up having to camp on the mountain overnight in their finery, because the road back to town was blocked by fallen debris.If you read Chinese, there is more about the incident and the photos on a Chinese news site, sohu.com. Funny thing about weddings and natural disasters: Some of the best-remembered anecdotes and images of the great hurricane of 1938, which killed 380 people in Rhode Island, are connected with Joe and Loraine Fogel, who went ahead with their scheduled nuptials that morning in the Narragansett Hotel in downtown Providence. They and their wedding party lived to tell the tale, too.

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/23/from-china-disaster-caught-in-a-wedding-lens/index.html?partner=BREITBART&ei=5123

As in the days of Noah....