St. Anthony grad survives China quake
‘I was just praying and singing hymns’By BRIAN PERRY, Assistant City Editor
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It was “like a drum roll,” said Brigham Young University senior Ashley Bowers, of the violent shaking that she felt.
Bowers, 23, and a couple of other female students ran to a bathroom doorway at the school, situated 50 to 60 miles away from the epicenter of the magnitude-7.9 earthquake that struck at 2:27 p.m. local time Monday.
“We started singing church songs to calm us down,” she said in a cell phone interview Wednesday afternoon Hawaii time, although it was Thursday morning in China. “We felt more at peace.”
Bowers, a 2002 graduate of St. Anthony Junior Senior High School, is the daughter of Christine and Dan Bowers of Kihei.
She said she didn’t watch what was happening around her, but other students saw parts of the building come down.
“A lot of people thought the building was going to collapse,” she said. “I wasn’t thinking. I was just praying and singing hymns.”
She said she was hoping she wasn’t going to die.
“It wasn’t that time yet,” she said.
Bowers said news reports were that the earthquake’s duration was three minutes. She didn’t know exactly how long it was, but “it did feel like a long time.”
When the earthquake finally ended, she and other students, who were on the second floor of a building at the conservatory, ran downstairs and outside, still fearful that the building might fall down.
Bowers said no one in her group — 22 female students and two teachers from BYU in Provo, Utah — was injured, although the emotional impact was deeply felt.
“We were all in shock and shaking,” she said. “We had trouble sleeping that night.”
