Aid pours into Myanmar as quake deaths breach 1,600
BANGKOK—Foreign rescue teams and supplies arrived in Myanmar on Sunday to help the impoverished country cope with an earthquake that has killed more than 1,600 and left many near the epicenter scrambling for help without proper equipment.
The magnitude 7.7 quake, one of Myanmar’s strongest in a century, jolted the Southeast Asian nation on Friday, leaving 1,644 people dead, 3,408 injured and 139 missing, the military government said.
India, China and Thailand are among Myanmar’s neighbors that have sent relief materials and teams, along with aid and personnel from Malaysia, Singapore and Russia.
Critical infrastructure—including bridges, highways, airports and railways—across the country of 55 million lay damaged, slowing humanitarian efforts while a civil war that has battered the economy, displaced over 3.5 million people and debilitated the health system rages on.
In some of the hardest-hit areas, residents told Reuters that government assistance was scarce, leaving people to fend for themselves.
Hospitals struggle
“It is necessary to restore the transportation routes as soon as possible,” the junta chief, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, told officials on Saturday, according to state media.
“It is necessary to fix the railways and also reopen the airports so that rescue operations would be more effective.”
The US Geological Service’s predictive modeling estimated Myanmar’s death toll could top 10,000 and losses could exceed the country’s annual economic output.
Hospitals in parts of central and northwestern Myanmar, including the second-biggest city, Mandalay, and the capital Naypyitaw, were struggling to cope with an influx of injured people, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said late on Saturday.
The quake also shook parts of neighboring Thailand, bringing down a skyscraper being built in Bangkok and killing 17 people across the capital, according to Thai authorities.
At least 78 people remained trapped under the debris of the collapsed building, where rescue operations continued for a third day, using drones and sniffer dogs to hunt for survivors.
In Myanmar, the devastation piled more misery on a nation already in chaos with the civil war, which has escalated since a 2021 military coup that ousted the elected government of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi and sparked a nationwide armed uprising.
Bridge gone
The devastation in some areas of upper Myanmar, such as the town of Sagaing near the quake’s epicenter, was extensive, said resident Han Zin.
Sections of a major bridge connecting Sagaing to nearby Mandalay collapsed, satellite imagery showed, with spans of the colonial-era structure submerged in the Irrawaddy river.
In Mandalay, scores of people were feared trapped under collapsed buildings and most could not be reached or pulled out without heavy machinery, two humanitarian workers and two residents said.
“My teams in Mandalay are using work gloves, ropes and basic kits to dig and retrieve people,” said one of the humanitarian workers. Reuters is not naming them because of security concerns.
“There are countless trapped and still missing. The death toll is impossible to count at the moment due to the number trapped and unidentified, if alive.”
