In great disasters, survival sometimes appears to depend on chance. A teacher wakes early. A building is built with care. A child refuses to enter a teahouse. A clock runs slow.

But are these only accidents? Or do they point to a deeper relationship between fate, conscience, and the choices people make before disaster arrives?

The broken clock that saved a school

During the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake, all the classrooms at Baiguo Primary School in Dujiangyan collapsed. Yet not a single student died.

The reason seemed almost unbelievable: An old clock in the school’s reception room had been running slow.

The man responsible for ringing the school bell followed that electronic clock and did not dare change the schedule on his own. The clock had been used for more than 20 years and had recently become unreliable, sometimes running fast and sometimes slow. Repairs had not fixed the problem.

On May 12, the preparatory bell should have rung at 2:20 p.m. Beijing time, calling students back into the classrooms. But the old clock showed only 2:11. More than seven minutes later, at 2:28 p.m., the earthquake struck. On the broken clock, it was still only 2:19, so the students were still outside playing.

The classrooms collapsed, but the children were not inside.

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