Taiwan rescuers pull out survivors from quake rubble

The quake struck southern Taiwan early Saturday, toppling at least one high-rise residential building.

Rescuers raced against time Sunday to free more than 100 people still buried beneath the rubble of apartment blocks felled by a powerful natural disaster in southern Taiwan that left 18 dead.

The emergency center in Tainan, the worst-hit city, said Sunday that 171 people had been rescued from the building following the magnitude-6.4 quake that struck at dawn Saturday.

Tainan Mayor Lai Ching-te says life detectors at the collapsed 17-story high-rise found at least 29 people still alive but trapped inside.

More than 200 people escaped or were rescued from the 17-story building, the Central News Agency said.

Firefighters and soldiers scrambled to the site of two collapsed residential high-rises with ladders, cranes and other equipment and extracted 221 people from the rubble.

The center still lists 155 people as injured, but the news website ET Today is reporting the number has climbed to 318 people hospitalized.

Interior minister Chen Wei-jen said he feared there may have been more people in the building than usual as family members would have returned to celebrate the Lunar New Year holidays next week.

Local authorities said Saturday that more than 100 people remained missing and that rescuers were racing to find them.

Liu Shih-chung, Tainan city government deputy secretary general, said television footage of the ruins of the commercial-residential building suggested the possibility of structural problems related to poor-quality reinforced steel and cement.

“(When the quake hit) I slid down from my bed and was trapped between the bed and a closet”, resident Su Yi-ming, 48, told AFP. It was located some 22 miles (35 kilometers) southeast of Yujing, and struck about 6 miles (10 kilometers) underground, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

Video shot by CNN affiliate SETTV showed rescuers helping several people from the rubble, including one man with blood on his face.

The dead taken from the collapsed apartment block on Saturday included a 10-day-old girl who was found in her dead father’s arms, media reported.

Authorities said two people were killed by falling objects elsewhere in Tainan.

Local media reported the construction company that built the complex had gone out of business and also raised questions over the quality of the materials used.

The emergency management information center said 1,236 rescuers from outside Tainan were deployed, including 840 from the army, along with six helicopters and 23 rescue dogs.

Tainan’s municipal government said it mobilised almost 600 professional and volunteer firefighters.

The quake occurred two days prior to Spring Festival, the lunar new year holiday.

CNA reported that Madonna offered her condolences to those affected when she performed Saturday night before thousands of fans on the other side of the island in the capital, Taipei, where the quake was felt as a lengthy, rolling shake. But Taipei was quiet, with no sense of emergency or obvious damage just before dawn.

Residents in mainland China also reported that the tremor was felt there, with Beijing offering assistance if needed.

Because of the collapse of the residential high-rise, questions surfaced about whether the 1989 structure had shoddy construction.

Taiwan is in the so-called “Ring of Fire”, an area in the Pacific Ocean where intense tectonic plate movement causes frequent earthquakes.

A 7.6-magnitude quake struck the island in September 1999 and killed around 2,400 people.