The residents rushed desperately in the buildings collapsed on Sunday in search of survivors while the replicas shaken the devastated city of Mandalay, two days after a massive earthquake killed more than 1,600 people in Myanmar and at least 17 in neighboring Thailand.
The initial earthquake of 7.7 coarse struck near the central city of Mandalay in the center of Myanmar early Friday afternoon, followed a few minutes later by a replica of 6.7 coarse.
The tremors collapsed the buildings, the slaughtered bridges and the curly roads, with a massive destruction seen in the city of more than 1.7 million people.
While Dawn broke on Sunday, the owner of the tea shop wins Lwin has made his way through the remains of a collapsed restaurant on a main road in his neighborhood, throwing bricks aside one by one.
“About seven people died here” when the earthquake struck on Friday, he told AFP. “I am looking for more bodies but I know that there can be no survivors.
“We don’t know how many bodies could be there, but we look.”
About an hour later, a small replica struck, sending people rushing to a hotel for safety, after a similar tremor felt late on Saturday evening.
Firefighter trucks have gathered in one of the main Mandalay fire station to be sent to city sites.
The previous night, the rescuers had released a living woman from the wreckage of a collapsed building, with sounding applause when she was transported by stretcher to an ambulance.
The Myanmar power junta said in a statement on Saturday that at least 1,644 people had been killed and more than 3,400 injured in the country, with at least 139 missing.
But with unreliable communications, the real scale of the disaster remains uncertain in the isolated state of the military state, and the toll should increase significantly.
The chief of the Junta, Min Aung Hlaing, issued an exceptionally rare appeal for international aid on Friday, indicating the gravity of calamity.
Previous military governments have avoided foreign assistance, even after major natural disasters.
Myanmar has already been ravaged by four years of civil war launched by a military coup in 2021.
Anti-Junta fighters in the country declared a partial two-week part-fire ceasefire in the regions affected by the earthquake from Sunday, the government of national ghost unit said in a statement. The soldiers would have continued air strikes after the earthquake, including a few hours later.
The government in exile has said that it would “collaborate with the UN and NGOs to guarantee the safety, transport and creation of temporary rescue and medical camps” in areas it controls, according to the press release, published on social networks.
Help agencies have warned that Myanmar is not prepared to deal with a disaster of this magnitude.
The UN humanitarian agency OCHA said that a serious lack of medical supplies as well as infrastructure damage led to the earthquake.
The agency said hospitals and health establishments had suffered significant damage or had been destroyed.
“Telecommunications and internet disruptions continue to hinder communications and humanitarian operations. Damaged roads and debris are hindering humanitarian access and complicates needs assessments, “he added.
The agency said that a convoy of 17 neighboring China loading trucks carrying shelters and medical supplies should arrive on Sunday.
About 3.5 million people were moved by the raging civil war, much at risk of hunger, even before the earthquake strikes.
On the other side of the border in Thailand, Bangkok rescuers worked on Sunday to eliminate trapped survivors when a 30-storey skyscraper under construction collapsed after the earthquake on Friday.
The Bangkok Metropolitan Authority said that 32 people had been injured and still not counted – most of the site of a 30 -storey block under construction which collapsed when the magnitude 7.7 earthquake struck on Friday.
Dozens of others were still trapped under the immense heap of debris where the skyscraper was once.
The site workers used large mechanical diggers to try to find victims still trapped on Sunday morning.
Sniff dogs and thermal imaging drones have also been deployed to look for signs of life in the collapsed building, near the popular catuchak weekend market among tourists.
The authorities said they would deploy engineers to assess and repair 165 damaged buildings in the city on Sunday.
Agency France-Press contributed to this report
