HONG KONG — Taiwan raced to rescue hundreds of trapped and missing people on Thursday, a day after the biggest earthquake on the island in 25 years that killed at least ten people.
As of Thursday afternoon local time, there were 1,099 people injured, 705 people trapped and 15 missing, according to the Central Disaster Response Center. The death toll from Wednesday’s 7.4-magnitude tremor ticked up slightly from the earlier toll of nine.
Officials said most of those trapped were at a hotel and activity center in eastern Taiwan’s Taroko National Park, which was cut off by road damage, and that they had been confirmed to be safe.
The Wednesday quake, which struck during the morning commute, was felt across the island and in the wider region and shook buildings in the Taiwanese capital, Taipei. The island’s Central Weather Administration continued to report aftershocks on Thursday.
Rescue efforts were focused on people trapped on and around a damaged highway into Hualien, a city of about 100,000 on the east coast of Taiwan near the epicenter of the quake. Supplies will be airdropped to those who are stranded if necessary, local media reported.
Six people who had been trapped in a mining area were rescued by helicopter Thursday morning.
Twenty-six of about 50 hotel workers traveling to a resort in Taroko National Park have been found, Reuters reported, citing Taiwan’s fire department. The fire department showed drone footage of other hotel workers waving from the side of a road, near a minibus that had been crushed in the back.
Rail service to the Hualien area was also restored Thursday.
Wednesday’s earthquake was the strongest to hit Taiwan since 1999, when a 7.6-magnitude tremor killed about 2,400 people, said Wu Chien-fu, director of Taiwan’s Seismological Center.
Taiwan authorities have taken major steps to improve earthquake preparedness and response since then, said Daniel Aldrich, director of the Resilience Studies Program at Northeastern University in Boston.
That includes “top-down” measures like a strict enforcement of building codes, he said.
“They’ve also organized a number of ‘bottom-up’ responses, so making sure individual residents know what to do,” Aldrich said. “Where’s the evacuation shelter? What do I do? Where do I go?”
The result, he said, is far fewer casualties in Taiwan than have been reported in earthquakes of similar strength in places such as Haiti, India and China.
The lessons of the “top-down, bottom-up” approach to disaster management can be applied around the world, Aldrich said, including in the United States, where he said planning in earthquake-prone places such as California could be improved.
“In many ways, the disaster’s outcome is not the function of the disaster, per se, but about the situation in the country before it happened,” he said.
