The people from Greenleaf carefully organized the information they had gathered, putting it in chronological order and listing the events that had taken place on Guangyuan Highway one by one.
The earthquake date that had been widely circulated online was the first thing they mentioned, but only to debunk it. There had never been an earthquake on Mount Taian, where Guangyuan Highway was located. The villagers who lived on Mount Taian had moved away centuries ago, during the feudal era, as part of a mass relocation in the area. They had settled in the sparsely populated northwest. After several hundred years of development, villages and cities had sprung up there again, but none of the new residents had settled on Mount Taian. At most, they lived at its foot.
Guangyuan Highway was completed in 2000 to provide access to Mount Taian's natural resources. The mountain was densely forested, with many towering trees. The highway was built to allow large trucks to transport timber from the mountain. The local authorities decided to cut down trees on Mount Taian while planting new saplings, creating plantations and secondary forests. The work went smoothly at first. Then, in July 2002, a lumber mill on Mount Taian caught fire unexpectedly, forcing it to close temporarily.
The case was complicated, and the on-site investigation and subsequent compensation claims took quite some time. By the time everything was settled, it was late December 2004. The municipal leadership of Suining had changed by then. The provincial government overseeing Suining had also undergone a change of leadership, and the city's development plans had shifted as well. The authorities decided to connect Suining with Mengxiang, which lay beyond a mountain, and build a high-tech industrial park in a nearby city, linking the cities together. That was also when they decided