As anxious families waited nearby, rescuers on Sunday painstakingly pulled more survivors from the remains of a high-rise apartment building that collapsed a day earlier in a powerful quake that shook southern Taiwan and killed at least 32 people.
Advertisement
More than 100 people are believed to be still buried in the collapsed building from a disaster that struck during the most important family holiday in the Chinese calendar – the Lunar New Year holiday.
Family members of the missing continued to flood into the information center in search of their loved ones or sit by anxiously. In 1999 a 7.6 magnitude hit central Taiwan, killing more than 2,000 individuals.
Taiwan’s government said in a statement that 36 of the 38 dead were from the Wei-guan building, which was built in 1994. The work could take up to an hour, the rescuers said.
Wendy Chuang, a reporter in Taiwan described to the CBS Radio News how the said building became unrecognizable after the quake. It is one of the country’s biggest holidays and some people have as many as nine days off. Taiwanese President has subdued the Chinese New Year ceremony to oversee rescue and recovery operations at the national disaster headquarters.
As of Sunday, 310 people were rescued from the wreckage of the building.
“Taiwan is very used to earthquakes and tremors, but this is far more significant than the island has seen in quite a while”, Elise Hu, an NPR correspondent who was in Taipei when the quake hit, told CNN.
“They complained that the building wasn’t well constructed as there were cracks in the walls and tiles fell off after several quakes in recent years”, he told AFP.
A woman had also been freed earlier according to rescuers. Another infant – a 6-month-old – was pulled out alive with her father’s dead body still hugging her. The baby died later at the hospital. At last 24 of the victims were residents of the collapsed 17-storey Wei-guan Golden Dragon Building in Tainan’s Yongkang District, while 118 are still missing.
Tainan deputy mayor Yen Chun-tso who visited the hospital with Ma added: “More than 100 people are trapped at the bottom and every single one of them is a challenge”, but pledged rescuers would not give up.
“I’ve contacted judicial units and prosecutors have formally launched an investigation”, said William Lai, the mayor of Tainan, Taiwan’s oldest city.
Advertisement
“She is awake, but looks dehydrated, lost some temperature but she’s awake and her blood pressure is okay”, he said.
