Rescue teams in Taiwan are racing to free trapped people after the more than seven-magnitude earthquake, the largest in 25 years, shook the country yesterday.
Among them were more than 130 people trapped inside buses moving through tunnels in Hualien district.Authorities earlier said they had lost contact with the trapped people.
The toll so far is nine dead and 946 injured after the earthquake. Another 70 are trapped in a mining area in Heping district in north central Taiwan, while another six are trapped in a mining area in Zonhe district southwest of the capital Taipei. Another 11 people are trapped on Taiwan’s provincial highway.
Critical hours for people trapped inside tunnel
Rescue efforts are critical to save the 137 people trapped inside buses that were driving through tunnels when the earthquake hit. These people are stuck in tunnels along the Suhua Highway – which runs along the east coast and is one of the most dramatic and dangerous roads in Taiwan, known both for its beautiful views of the Pacific Ocean and for its danger. On one side is a mountain and on the other is the ocean. This road was cut through the mountainside and blasted using literal dynamite and manual labour, mostly military labour in the 1950s.
This 50-kilometre-long section of road has several tunnels, some of which are quite long. Their condition remains unknown, whether they are safe, whether they have food and water, whether they can communicate with the outside world or not. Also, rescue teams do not know how long it will take to get to them.
Eye witness accounts of the earthquake
The eyewitness account of a resident of the capital is shocking. Filmmaker Nga Pham was in the capital Taipei when the earthquake struck the east coast of the island. She was making coffee when everything started shaking and shaking around her. “It was really, really scary,” she told the BBC. “I was holding on to my bookcase trying to steady myself because everything else was falling – my library books and my glassware and my dishes and so on and I could hear people screaming. So it was really, really scary for about five to ten minutes. Actually for me it lasted much longer because in my head I was saying – what should I do, what should I do?”.
Antoine Rousseau was at work on the 9th floor of an office building when it “started to shake very, very loudly”.
“It’s not my first earthquake in Taiwan, but I’ve never felt an earthquake that strong before, and then I heard things falling and I didn’t know what to do, I was like running down the stairs; And then I decided to go under the table and sit under the table, but the Taiwanese people were just standing up and we could see things falling down, it was really confusing. “We’re still a bit shocked because when it happened it was really loud, so even the Taiwanese were really scared… I could see that they weren’t used to that type of magnitude earthquake,” he says.
Antoine goes on to say that he and his colleagues continued to experience aftershocks every 30 minutes thereafter.
