TAINAN // Rescuers were racing to find more than 150 people still missing late on Saturday after a powerful, shallow earthquake struck southern Taiwan before dawn, causing a high-rise residential building to collapse and killing 14 people.
Three hundred and forty were rescued from the rubble in Tainan, the city hit worst by the quake.
About 2,000 firefighters and soldiers scrambled with ladders, cranes and other equipment to the ruins of the 17-floor residential building, which folded on to its side after the quake struck.
The national disaster response centre said a total of 156 people were still out of contact across Tainan and the neighbouring counties of Chiayi and Yunlin.
The quake hit two days before the start of Lunar New Year celebrations that mark the most important family holiday in the Chinese calendar.
The collapsed building had 256 registered residents, but far more people could have been inside when it fell because the population might have swelled ahead of the holiday, when
families typically play host to guests.
Local media said the building included a care centre for newborns and mothers, and a newborn was among the dead.
Most people were caught asleep when the magnitude-6.4 earthquake occurred at about 4am, 35 kilometres south-east of Yujing.
It struck 10 kilometres underground, according to the US Geological Survey.
The high-rise building “first starting shaking horizontally, then up and down, then a big shake right to left”, said Tainan resident Lin Bao-gui, a second-hand car salesman whose stock was smashed when the building across the street from him collapsed.
“I stayed in my bed but jumped up when I heard the big bang that was the sound of the building falling,” he said.
Authorities in Tainan said 14 people were killed, including 11 who were found at the ruins of the fallen building.
The national emergency management information centre said 477 people were injured, with 380 discharged from hospitals by Saturday evening.
Rescuers found the bodies of a 10-day-old infant, three other children and six adults at the collapsed building.
One other death was reported at the site.
Authorities said two people were killed by falling objects elsewhere in Tainan, while throughout the city, 337 trapped people were rescued.
The information centre said at least 248 survivors were pulled out of the collapsed building.
One Taiwanese news website reported that a mother and daughter were among the survivors from the building and that the girl drank her urine while waiting to be rescued.
Rescuers went apartment to apartment, drawing red circles near the windows of those they had searched.
“I went to the top floors of the middle part of the building, where we found five people, one of whom was in bed and already dead,” said Liu Wen-bin, a 50-year-old rescuer from Taichung.
“Some people were found in the shower, some in the bedroom.”
* Associated Press, Agence France-Presse
