The earthquake’s effects were felt in neighbouring Bangladesh and India’s northeast and Kolkata megapolis.
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Bagan is home to more than 2,000 ancient Buddhist structures, including temples and pagodas dating back to 10th through the 14th centuries.
Red Cross officials said they received reports of three people who died in the tremor – two children and one resident from two towns close to the epicentre.
The quake emanated from a depth of 84 km, according to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).
The government’s Relief and Resettlement Department was leading the response, and has found four schools damaged in northwest Myanmar, U.N. OCHA and local authorities said.
Anxious residents of Yangon, the country’s main city, rushed out of tall buildings, and objects toppled from tables and from Buddhist shrines in homes. “But it will be a very lengthy process and quite expensive”, the president told reporters after visiting several of the damaged stupas.
Amanda George from the International Red Cross in Myanmar said that while the organization continued to provide help and assistance in search and rescue operations, it was not treating it as a major emergency situation.
Sulamani Temple suffered heavy damage in the aftermath of the natural disaster. Most reports were of damage to the famed pagodas in central Myanmar, particularly around Bagan, and smaller, basic buildings. A hospital was damaged in Pakkoku, where one person was injured, and other buildings affected, while two houses collapsed near Chauk.
“We will take experts’ opinions and then try to see what is the best way to restore it”.
“It’s really heartbreaking; I can not even eat”, said Tin Hla Oo, a trustee of the three-story Htilominlo Temple, which was badly damaged by the quake. It rivals Cambodia’s Angkor Wat and Borobudur in Indonesia as Southeast Asia’s premier archaeological site. They have not been contacted by tourists with cancellations, they said, and would remain operating as normal.
Myanmar is in a seismically active part of the world where the Indo-Australian Plate runs up against the Eurasian Plate.
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Myanmar military members sweep the ground at the damaged, ancient Htilominlo Temple on August 25, 2016, after a 6.8 magnitude natural disaster hit Bagan. On Tuesday, a 5.5-magnitude quake in the Myanmar-India border region also rocked Assam, Tripura, Mizoram, Meghalaya and some other parts of northeast India.
