A rescue worker carries a woman out of a hospital in Naypyidaw, Myanmar, on Friday
A rescue worker carries a woman out of a hospital in Naypyidaw, Myanmar, on Friday
The software engineer was in his seventh-floor flat on Friday afternoon when he felt the apartment building sway as though “on a spring”.
When a second round of tremors struck, the 40-year-old Thiruvananthapuram native, who has been working in Yangon for the past decade, ran down the stairs with scores of other residents of the 14-storey building.
“By the time I reached downstairs, a third tremor could be felt,” the techie, who didn’t want to be named, told The Telegraph over the phone.
“The situation is much worse in Myanmar than what the local media has reported,” he added, citing the lack of press freedom under the military junta. Internet platforms including X, Facebook and WhatsApp are already blocked in the country, he said.
“Scores of people, including children, are still trapped under collapsed buildings. Myanmar is under (Western) sanctions and there is no adequate machinery to retrieve the dead and the injured from under the debris,” he said.
“Many injured people have been kept outside the hospitals as the hospital infrastructure has been devastated.”
In Bangkok, the capital of neighbouring Thailand and about 1,000km from the epicentre, Renuka Sreekumar was about to start her afternoon siesta when the entire building shook.
The Duthawadi Bridge near the entrance to the Mandalay International Airport cuts a sorry figure after the earthquake in Myanmar
The Duthawadi Bridge near the entrance to the Mandalay International Airport cuts a sorry figure after the earthquake in Myanmar
The 75-year-old homemaker from Thiruvananthapuram, who spends several months a year with her 45-year-old son and his family in Bangkok, climbed down 10 floors with her husband.
It’s not advisable to take the lift during an earthquake. The couple saw many elderly residents — some in their late 80s — sitting calmly in their wheelchairs as they were being carried down the stairs.
“My 78-year-old husband and I could at least walk down the stairs. When we reached the ground floor, we realised that all the people had remained calm,”Renuka said.
People had been instructed to get out of buildings, and shops had been told to close, for fear of aftershocks.
“People were helping each other, distributing drinking water and food. Some unlocked their car doors and allowed people to sit inside with the air-conditioner on,” Renuka said.
“Vendors of street food, which Bangkok is famous for, were doing brisk business. The (food and other) shops were shut as staff had to be evacuated. Like Swiggy and Zomato in India, we have a food delivery app, Grab, but they were unable to make deliveries. Many people survived on bread and croissants for dinner.”
Many of the wheelchair-bound were fed via nasal tubes outdoors.
After five hours of “curfew”, everyone was allowed to enter their buildings, she said. “Fortunately, there were no repeat tremors.”
The techie from Yangon said the city had escaped without heavy damage while Sagaing and Mandalay had taken the brunt. Large stretches of the 587km Yangon-Mandalay expressway are devastated and two of Myanmar’s three international airports — those in Naypyidaw and Mandalay — are affected.
Relief from India reached the international airport in Yangon on Saturday.