A powerful magnitude 6.8 natural disaster shook central Myanmar on Wednesday, damaging scores of ancient Buddhist pagodas in the former capital of Bagan, a major tourist attraction, officials said. Bagan is the country’s most famous archaeological site and a major tourist destination some 30km north of the quake’s epicentre.
Advertisement
UPDATED: 9:09 a.m. EDT – Residents in Yangon – Myanmar’s most populous city – evacuated tall buildings in the midst of Wednesday’s magnitude 6.8 quake in what the U.S. Geological Survey has called “one of the most seismically hazardous regions on Earth”.
Office buildings in the Thai capital Bangkok, to the east of Myanmar, shook for a few seconds, residents there said.
The quake was felt in a half dozen states in neighbouring India, where people rushed out of offices and homes at several places.
Tremors were felt across West Bengal, Bihar, Jharkhand, Orissa and parts of Northeast India on Wednesday as an quake measuring 6.7 on the open-ended Richter scale hit Myanmar.
In Bagan, known as the “City of 4 Million Pagodas”, one female tourist was injured at a pagoda, said local official Khin Mya Lwin.
It features more than 2,500 Buddhist monuments, of which at least 171 were damaged by the rattling earth, according to a Facebook posting by the Ministry of Religious and Cultural Affairs.
In fiscal year 2014-15, roughly 242,000 tourists who visited the zone generated about US $4.1 million, according to a May 2015 article in the Myanmar Times which cited figures from the Bagan branch of the Archaeology and National Museum Department.
“All of us ran to the streets leaving the houses and shops unsecured as the quake seemed very risky”, Nazmus Sakib, from the southern city of Chittagong near the Myanmar border, wrote on his Facebook wall. There were no immediate reports of casualties.
“It takes time to know how the structures are stabilised and how bad the actual damage is – if a roof collapses, how much it affects different walls and mural paintings”, Alam said. “There have also been reports of damage to smaller, more basic buildings”.
Tremors were felt as far away as Thailand, where witnesses reported high rise buildings swaying in Bangkok, and the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka.
“All of us ran to the streets, leaving houses and shops unsecured as the quake seemed very risky”, Mr Nazmus Sakib of Chittagong near the Myanmar border, wrote on Facebook.
Advertisement
So far, there have been no reports on human casualties from the quake.
