At least four people, including an eight-year-old girl, were rescued on Monday from a toppled high-rise apartment building in Taiwan more than 60 hours after an natural disaster struck the island.
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The quake struck at 4am on Saturday, at the beginning of the lunar new year holiday, and most of the dead were found in the toppled Wei-guan Golden Dragon building in Tainan.
Several people, who had been trapped under a collapsed building in Yungkang district for more than 10 hours, were rescued Saturday afternoon, state-run Central News Agency reported.
The other had lost her husband, while her son and pregnant daughter-in-law are missing.
Family members of the missing continued to flood into the information centre in search of their loved ones or sit by anxiously.
Shortly afterward, rescue workers also pulled out a 28-year-old Vietnamese woman, who had been trapped on what was the building’s fifth floor. A magnitude 7.6 quake in central Taiwan in 1999 was a recent exception, killing more than 2,300 people.
Tainan mayor William Lai said Tsao and Li were the only signs of life at present, although rescuers were continuing to look for others.
“I was talking to my husband and told him we have to get out together”.
A six-month-old baby girl who was rescued from the rubble of a collapsed building in Taiwan after spending 30 hours underneath it has been reportedly rushed to the hospital. A rescue worker had handed over a photo album and homemade cards found next to her for her family to collect, said local official Wang Ding-yu.
The latest quake occurred as Taiwan was preparing to celebrate the Lunar New Year, a major holiday that began Monday and during which people travel to be with family.
“All of Taiwan is with these rescuers and the people of Tainan”, Taiwanese president-elect Tsai Ing-wen said, referring to the city that sustained most of the destruction. Though the building was not listed as one of Taiwan’s unsafe structure, Chen Wei-zen, Taiwan’s interior minister, promised that an investigation will soon be conducted regarding the issue. Lin Tong-meng said he had been waiting at the site for word of his 11- and 12-year-old nephews.
Of those, 24 were in the Weiguan Jinlong apartment building in the city of Tainan, presidential spokeswoman Ma Wei-kuo said Sunday.
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Meanwhile, from across the Taiwan Strait, Chinese President Xi Jinping offered his “deepest sympathies” and condolences to those affected by the quake.
