Debris surrounds a tilted building a day after a powerful earthquake struck, in Hualien City, eastern Taiwan, on April 4, 2024.
| Photo Credit: AP

Rescuers searched for dozens of people out of contact on April 4, a day after Taiwan’s strongest earthquake in a quarter century damaged buildings, caused multiple rockslides and killed nine people.

In the eastern coastal city of Hualien near the epicentre, workers used an excavator to put construction materials around the base of a damaged building to stabilise it and prevent a collapse. Mayor Hsu Chen-wei previously said 48 residential buildings were damaged. Some of the damaged buildings tilted at precarious angles with their ground floors crushed.

More than 1,000 people were injured in the quake that struck on Wednesday morning. Of the nine dead, at least four were struck inside Taroko National Park, a tourist attraction famous for its scenes of canyons and cliffs in Hualien County, about 150 km (90 miles) from the island’s capital Taipei.

“Nearly 150 people were either still trapped or out of contact on April 4,” the National Fire Agency said.

About two dozen tourists and some others were stranded in the park. The Health and Welfare Ministry said 64 others were workers at a rock quarry. Six workers from another quarry were airlifted from the area where access was cut off because roads were damaged by falling rocks.

Several people, including six university students, were also reported to be trapped. Around 50 people, mostly employees at the hotel earlier reported to be in the national park, were out of contact with authorities.

For hours after the quake, TV showed neighbours and rescue workers lifting residents through windows and onto the street from damaged buildings where the shaking had fused shut the doors. It wasn’t clear on Thursday morning if any people were trapped in the damaged buildings.

The temblor and aftershocks caused many landslides and damaged roads, bridges and tunnels. The national legislature and sections of Taipei’s main airport had minor damage.

Taiwan measured the initial quake’s strength as 7.2 magnitude while the U.S. Geological Survey put it at 7.4. The Central Weather Administration has recorded more than 300 aftershocks from Wednesday morning into Thursday.

Taiwan is regularly jolted by earthquakes and its population is among the best prepared for them. It also had stringent construction requirements to ensure buildings are quake-resistant.

The economic losses caused by the quake are still unclear. The self-ruled island is the leading manufacturer of the world’s most sophisticated computer chips and other high-technology items that are sensitive to seismic events.

Hualien was last struck by a deadly quake in 2018 that killed 17 people and brought down a historic hotel. Taiwan’s worst recent quake on September 21, 1999, a magnitude of 7.7 temblor, caused 2,400 deaths, injuring around 1,00,000 and destroying thousands of buildings.

Liu watched intently as rescuers carefully picked their way through the remains of a warehouse that crumbled like a house of cards Wednesday during Taiwan’s strongest earthquake in 25 years, telling AFP it “was like a mountain collapsed”.

Propping ladders against the debris, the rescue workers managed to pluck 50 survivors from the destroyed building in Liu’s New Taipei City, just outside the capital.

The building was about 60 years old and had housed a printing press, said Liu, who lived next door.

The 7.4-magnitude earthquake that struck at around 8:00 am local time (0000 GMT), reduced the building to jagged concrete blocks, steel bars, bricks and tangled wiring.

Residents of nearby buildings appeared to be unaffected, though they felt the intense shaking from the morning quake.

“Many of the decorations at home fell on the floor, but people were safe,” said Chang, who lives near the printing press. “We were very lucky.”

The quake was felt across Taiwan, with more than 100 aftershocks unnerving the island of around 23 million.

Its epicentre was in eastern Hualien county, a mountainous region known for its picturesque trails and seascape views.

At least nine people died in the quake — all in Hualien — with three killed on a hiking trail and two crushed in their vehicles by boulders from landslides.

More than 800 were injured across Taiwan.

Images filmed by a train passenger and obtained by AFP’s verification team showed a landslide near one Hualien trail, sending up a cloud of white dust across its mountain ridges.

A driver shot a video of another landslide spilling onto a road near the region’s famed Taroko National Park, with cars emerging from a cloud of sand and dust.

Some buildings around Hualien were left tilting dangerously, with military personnel climbing into the structures using ladders.

A group of firefighters used a cherry picker to reach a window and hand tools to workers inside.

On the island’s western coast in Taichung — Taiwan’s second-largest city — a road was cut off by a landslide, with massive boulders falling from a mountain ridge and blocking off traffic.

The shallow quake — the United States Geological Survey put it at about 34.8 kilometres deep — was “felt all over Taiwan”, said Wu Chien-fu, director of Taipei’s Central Weather Administration’s Seismology Center.

“It’s the strongest in 25 years since the (1999) earthquake,” he said, adding that authorities were not ruling out subsequent tremors in the next three days.

The 1999 earthquake hit central Taiwan, killing around 2,400 people in the deadliest natural disaster in the island’s history.

Taiwan’s defence ministry said it had deployed cargo planes to take dozens of rescuers to Hualien, where people were reportedly trapped in tunnels that carve through the mountains.

‘Really scared’

Taiwan is accustomed to earthquakes as the island lies near the junction of two tectonic plates.

Buildings in major cities are made to withstand strong tremors, and while there are high-rises in the capital Taipei, people tend to prefer to live in structures less than 10 storeys high.

In New Taipei City, Mayor Hou Yu-ih surveyed the scene of the printing press collapse with rescue workers, and reassured reporters that all 57 people in the building had made it out — with just one injured.

Chang, who lived nearby, said the 1999 quake was the worst she had ever experienced.

“Most people were asleep (when it happened) but I was not so I clearly felt it — it was very serious, far more serious than this time,” she said.

But one woman in Hualien said she was “really scared” because Wednesday’s quake lasted a long time.

“I am used to earthquakes but this is the first time I was so scared that my hands kept shaking,” she said in a Facebook post.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)