Taiwan rescuers free nine from cave after earthquake

AFP |Taipei                                              

The Daily Tribune – www.newsofbahrain.com

Rescuers freed nine people trapped in a winding cave in Taiwan’s mountainous east yesterday, while locating two others who were feared dead, as they searched for those still missing after the island’s biggest earthquake in 25 years.

The official death toll from Wednesday ’s magnitude-7.4 quake still stood at 10, but the government in the hardest-hit area of Hualien county said two more people on a hiking trail were found with “no signs of life”.

Crushed by a landslide, the two people were buried deep beneath massive boulders, making it difficult for workers to get to them.

“Their bodies have been found, but they have not been excavated yet. We will add them to the death toll after they are excavated and identified,” said Interior Minister Lin Yu-chang. Hundreds more were still stranded around the mountains that flank the county yesterday, with roads blocked off by landslides and rockfalls.

However, most were known to be safe as rescuers deployed helicopters, drones and smaller teams with dogs to reach them. Rescuers had found nine people alive in a cave popular with tourists called the Tunnel of Nine Turns yesterday. Lin said that progress was “ahead of schedule”.

“There are still aftershocks and rocks falling but in a very short period of about five hours today, we have managed to repair 10 kilometres of roads,” he said.

In the main city of Hualien, authorities allowed residents to enter a building with a crumbling facade in 15-minute intervals so that they could retrieve their belongings.

Some opted to throw mattresses and bags of clothing out the window, while a young mother slowly carried a cot out for her 10-month-old baby.

“We are told the building has become dangerous and there probably won’t be another chance to move our things afterwards,” said the 24-year-old woman surnamed Chen.

“During the big quake... I was only thinking about protecting my baby at the time,” she said. “I didn’t expect it to be so serious and the structure below has become like that.”

Ten minutes away, workers started demolishing a building named Uranus -- tilting at a 45-degree angle after half its first floor pancaked -- by first using a pink crane to smash its glass windows.

The plan was to slowly take it apart -- a process that could take two weeks -- but an aftershock around 1 pm alarmed the construction team as the building appeared to lean more perilously forward.