Rescuers in Taiwan planned to bring in heavy equipment on Saturday to try to recover two bodies buried on a hiking trail, while more than 600 people remained stranded in various locations, three days after the island’s strongest earthquake in 25 years.
Four people remain missing on the same Shakadang Trail in Taroko national park, famed for its rugged mountainous terrain. Search and recovery work was set to resume after being called off on Friday afternoon because of aftershocks.
At least 12 people were killed by the magnitude 7.4 earthquake that struck on Wednesday morning off Taiwan’s east coast, and 10 others were still missing.
More than 600 people – including about 450 at a hotel in the Taroko park – remained stranded, cut off by rockslides and other damage in different areas. However, many were known to be safe as rescuers deployed helicopters, drones and smaller teams with dogs to reach them.
On Friday, rescuers freed nine people trapped in a winding cave popular with tourists called the Tunnel of Nine Turns in the island’s mountainous east, while locating two others who were feared dead.
“I kept praying and praying,” said a woman evacuated from the cave, adding that the earthquake had sounded like “a bomb”.
Among the four missing on Shakadang Trail were a family of five. The two bodies found on Friday were a man and a woman but they had not yet been identified, according to Taiwanese media reports.
In the city of Hualien, authorities allowed residents to enter a building with a crumbling facade in 15-minute intervals so 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.
“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”.
Ten minutes away, workers started demolishing a building named Uranus that was tilting at a 45-degree angle after half its first floor pancaked.
As night fell, workers used a crane to twist the roof off the concrete structure.
Next to Uranus, a digital sign on another building said: “Don’t give up! Hualien add oil!”, using a Chinese expression of support.
The national disaster agency said more than 1,100 people had been injured.
Meanwhile, Taiwan lashed out at Bolivia on Saturday for expressing solidarity with China after the quake on the island Beijing views as its own.
Bolivia’s foreign ministry issued a statement on Friday saying the country “expresses its solidarity with the sister People’s Republic of China, in the face of the loss of life and severe material damage caused by a large earthquake that occurred in recent hours off the coast of Taiwan”.
Taiwan foreign minister, Joseph Wu, said on X (formerly Twitter) on Saturday: “You shouldn’t be the evil, expansionist PRC’s pathetic puppet that jumps when Beijing says jump.
“Just like Taiwan, Bolivia is NOT part of communist China. No more, no less,” he added.
Taiwan’s relatively low number of deaths from such a powerful earthquake has been attributed to strict construction standards and widespread public education campaigns on the earthquake-prone island.
A magnitude 7.7 earthquake that struck in 1999 killed 2,400 people.
Associated Press and Agence France-Presse contributed reporting
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