A disaster evaluation team from Japan and a Taiwanese-Chinese husband-and-wife team have arrived to provide assistance in the wake of a series of earthquakes that hit southern Taiwan on Saturday, killing 29 people and injuring hundreds.
The five-member Japanese team yesterday went to Tainan, the city hardest hit by the quake, where they met with Tainan Mayor William Lai (賴清德) and inspected the site of the collapsed Weiguan Jinlong apartment building in the city’s Yongkang District (永康), where most of the earthquake deaths occurred.
After evaluating the situation, the team is expected to advise on local search-and-rescue efforts.
Photo courtesy of Miaoli County Fire Department
At least 120 people are believed to be still trapped in the 17-story building complex, one of several structures in Tainan that toppled after the magnitude 6.4 main earthquake struck.
At press time last night, the death toll had risen to 29, and 120 others remained unaccounted for, the Tainan City Fire Department said.
More than 500 people were injured in the quake, it said.
The evaluation team, assembled by Japan’s government and private sector, was dispatched to Taiwan after Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Saturday said that his country stood ready to provide assistance in the wake of the disaster.
The husband-and-wife team arrived on Saturday to join the efforts in Tainan. An additional 12 rescue workers from China were scheduled to arrive later in the day.
The two-member team called Ram Union carried out search-and-rescue operations last year in Nepal, which was struck by a magnitude 7.3 quake.
The two members are a couple — Liao Hsin-ming (廖信明) from Taipei and his wife, Liao Wei (廖偉), from Hangzhou in China.
Rescue personnel have been hampered by the precarious nature of the Weiguan Jinlong rubble and were forced to suspend work at one point, the city government said.
They had to reinforce parts of the structure with materials such as H-shaped steel before they could continue their search, it said.
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