Searching
WORLD: Rescuers were working to reach five people trapped and more than 140 people unaccounted for in buildings damaged by a strong earthquake near Taiwan’s coast.
TAIWAN: Rescuers yesterday were working to reach five people trapped and more than 140 people unaccounted for in several buildings damaged by a strong earthquake near Taiwan’s eastern coast.
The shallow and powerful quake caused at least four buildings in worst-hit Hualien county to cave in and tilt dangerously, killing four people.
Video footage and photos showed several midsized buildings leaning at sharp angles, their lowest floors crushed into mangled heaps of concrete, shattered glass, bent iron beams and other debris. Firefighters could be seen climbing ladders hoisted against windows as they sought to reach residents inside apartments.
The quake injured 225 people, two dozen of them critically, in Hualien county, the National Fire Agency said. The force of the tremor buckled roads and disrupted electricity and water supplies to thousands of households.
The official news agency said all but two of the 145 people who could not be reached might be in the Yunmen Cuiti building, a 12-storey apartment building, though it said it did not immediately have an estimate of how many were trapped.
A hotel employee died when the ground floor caved in at the Marshal Hotel, and another person died in a residential building, the agency reported.
A maintenance worker who was rescued after being trapped in the hotel’s basement said the force of the earthquake was unusual.
‘‘At first it wasn’t that big ... we get this sort of thing all the time and it’s really nothing. But then it got really terrifying,’’ Chen Minghui said after he was reunited with his family. ‘‘It was really scary.’’
Other buildings shifted on their foundations because of the magnitude-6.4 quake and rescuers used ladders, ropes and cranes to get residents to safety. With aftershocks continuing through the night, residents were being directed to shelters, including a newly built baseball stadium, where beds and hot food were provided.
The US Geological Survey said the magnitude-6.4 quake struck just before midnight Tuesday (local time) about 21 kilometres northeast of Hualien at a relatively shallow depth of about 10.6km. Taiwan has frequent earthquakes because of its position along the ‘‘Ring of Fire,’’ the seismic faults encircling the Pacific Ocean where most of the world’s earthquakes occur.