Warner, there as a guest of the Asian Football Confederation for its Vision Project tour of China, is stationed at a camp with several others, including other football officials awaiting to depart on a private jet owned by Asian Football Confederation President Mohamed Bin Hammam to Kual Lumpur.

“I saw death,” Warner said in a brief telephone call on Monday.

Warner described the traumatic experience which occurred during an interval between meetings as he occupied his room on the 31st floor of the Sheraton Hotel in Chengdu.

The quake hit about 60 miles northwest of Chengdu — a city of 3.75 million — in the middle of the afternoon when classrooms and office towers were full. There were several smaller aftershocks, the U.S. Geological Survey said on its Web site. The 7.8-magnitude earthquake devastated a hilly region of small cities and towns. The official Xinhua News Agency said 8,533 people died in Sichuan province and more than 200 others were killed in three other provinces and the mega-city of Chongqing. It has also been described as China's deadliest since 1976

“I was there dressed just lying on my bed for a couple minutes before going to another meeting and suddenly I felt the room moving left to right … mirrors were falling and I felt as though my room on the 31st floor was almost going down to road level and back up. I heard screams throughout this which lasted for about five minutes. I was dazed... I was stunned literally. Then it just subsided. I didn’t move... I just laid on the bed. Then the phone rang and they told me to just get down. I had to grab my passport and literally run down the staircase down to the lobby. At the time it appeared as though I was one the few persons left in the hotel. I collapsed outside because my knees were out after coming down those stairs,” Warner said.

“They took us to a nearby football field in which there were thousands of people. We were there for sometime before the escorted us to a camp near the hotel and we are here waiting for the airport to re-opened. Even today we are feeling after shocks and people are still very much traumatized.

“After this experience in a large country like China which is supposedly prepared for calamities like this and to see what they are going through now, I am convinced more than ever that in my country Trinidad... we are not prepared for such a disaster. And it is one of the first things I intend to bring up at my next Parliament meeting,” Warner added.

He said that one of the football stadiums built for the last FIFA Women’s World Cup withstood the earthquake and was being used as a shelter.

Once out of Chengdu, Warner is expected to head to New York via Kuala Lumpur and then return to Trinidad on Friday morning and intends to attend Parliament on Friday afternoon. He has cancelled his FIFA inspection visit to Nigeria.