Taiwan digs out from its deadly quake
Rescuers continue their work at tilting buildings. Number of fatalities rises to nine.
HUALIEN, Taiwan — Chen Chien-hsiang had just gone to sleep in the apartment where he had lived for about 20 years. So had most people in the 12-story building, tucked between a creek levee where people stroll by day and a neighborhood of restaurants and massage parlors that’s active at night.
When Chen awoke, his world had turned topsyturvy.
A magnitude 6.4 earthquake had violently rocked his building, then knocked it off its moorings. It was tilting at a 45-degree angle, spilling occupants into the corners of their apartments, with the floors suddenly sloping at crazy angles. Chen found it impossible to crawl or claw his way to the door.
“Wow, stuff was all over the place,” the 66-year-old retired antiques dealer said Wednesday. His sixth-floor flat had become, in effect, a second story.
Chen was among the dozens who would eventually be rescued from the multi-use building, the worst of five damaged in Taiwan’s quake. At least four people died there and an estimated six others were feared trapped in the hardest-hit ground level and second floor. Overall, the National Fire Agency reported, nine people died and 266 were injured in Tuesday’s quake.
The structure, named Yun Tsui, became a focal point Wednesday for hundreds of rescue personnel. Rescues had wrapped up at other damaged buildings, while hundreds more stood without incident in Hualien, a city of 100,000 on the northeastern coast of Taiwan.
Rescue crews led by the Hualien County Fire Department pulled all occupants out of floors three through 12 overnight, a department spokesman said. They were able to extend ladders onto balconies or through windows, many of which had been broken. Chen climbed onto a balcony after breaking through the glass door he could reach from the corner of a room.
But after dawn, the fire department suspended relief to take another look. The building was slowly continuing to tilt, threatening to collapse outright and threaten any rescue workers inside, disaster relief center worker Chen Tzai-tung said.
Portions of the bottom four floors collapsed. The lower two were partly buried. The building’s decorative, semicircular glass facade — one hallmark of Taiwanese multi-use architecture in the 1980s — had also caved into the ground.
So the county ordered four steel construction beams be inserted into the building’s mid-level windows and corners to stop it from collapsing. Then, as rain muddied the ground, rescue work stopped again so crews could place cratesized concrete blocks against the beams to stop them from slipping.
Six adults and one child, guests at a two-story inn, were trapped underground, fire department spokesman Chu Che-ming said.
“This work won’t go so quickly,” said Fan Kang-wei, a Red Cross volunteer at the scene. “Where these people are buried, we still don’t know. As it gets darker, it gets all the harder.”
“The whole thing was underground, so we had to dig and dig and dig,” said Yen I-chia, deputy captain with a rescue team from northern Taiwan, who was taking a break at his rainsoaked plastic tent a block away. “Progress is slow.”