[Image: Bangkok Post / Facebook]
A massive 7.7-magnitude earthquake rocked Myanmar on Friday, leaving over 1,600 dead and turning buildings into rubble.
While Myanmar is no stranger to quakes, sitting right in the danger zone, nearby Thailand and China, which also felt the shake, aren’t even in the high-risk club.
But this time, Bangkok, a cool 1,000km away, took quite a big hit. An unfinished high-rise in the city struggled with the shakes and straight-up collapsed.
Just FYI, the BBC noted that this earthquake, measuring 7.7 on the moment scale, produced more energy than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, according to the US Geological Survey.
Dramatic footage has emerged of high-rise buildings in Bangkok swaying during the quake, knocking water from rooftop pools, with some cracking in odd places.
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Somehow, though, the unfinished headquarters for the auditor-general’s office in Bangkok’s Chatuhak district appears to be the only skyscraper to have actually collapsed.
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Prof Amorn Pimarnmas, president of the Structural Engineers Association of Thailand, said that while there were regulations in 43 provinces on earthquake-proofing buildings, less than 10% of buildings are estimated to be quake-resistant.
Mandalay in Myanmar was much closer to where the ground slipped and would have experienced significantly more severe shaking than Bangkok.
But even though Myanmar regularly experiences earthquakes, it is unlikely that many buildings were constructed to be earthquake-proof, reckons Dr Ian Watkinson, a lecturer in earth sciences at Royal Holloway University.
“General poverty, major political upheaval, alongside other disasters – e.g. the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004 – has distracted the country from concentrating on the unpredictable risks from earthquakes,” he said.
“This means that, in many cases, building design codes are not enforced, and construction happens in areas that could be prone to enhanced seismic risk, for example flood plains and steep slopes.”
The death toll is expected to rise across these two regions as authorities search for those still buried under the rubble.
One woman was pulled out of the wreckage of a 12-story apartment building in Mandalay alive, NPR reports, while at the Sky Villa condominium, rescue workers were digging through the rubble with their hands. 90 people were feared to be trapped. The building housed apartments and a wedding venue, but its 12 stories now resemble six after it pancaked in seconds.
