Myanmar’s earthquake piles misery on civil war
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The Economist
Mar 31, 2025 08:46 AM IST
Myanmar declared a state of emergency. Buildings in Mandalay have toppled; fires have reportedly broken out; hospitals are overwhelmed.
IT WILL TAKE some days for the full toll of the powerful earthquake that struck Myanmar on March 28th to become clear. The epicentre lay just outside Mandalay, Myanmar’s second-largest city, which has a population of about 1.5m people. The earthquake’s magnitude was 7.7, the strongest recorded anywhere in the world since the quake that hit Turkey and Syria in 2023, killing 55,000. It is the biggest earthquake to hit the Myanmar mainland for three-quarters of a century. The tremor was felt by people across the region, including in Bangladesh, China, India, and Thailand. A day after it struck, the Myanmar authorities said that at least 1,600 people had died and that more than 3,400 people had been injured, numbers that are certain to rise further.
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Myanmar declared a state of emergency. Buildings in Mandalay have toppled; fires have reportedly broken out; hospitals are overwhelmed. The Ava Bridge, a historic road-and-rail crossing built by the British in 1934, collapsed. Parts of the city’s old royal palace fell down, too. Damage is reported in Yangon, Myanmar’s largest city (which lies 600km away from the epicentre) and in Naypyidaw, the country’s capital. The control tower of that city’s airport has collapsed, according to Mary Callahan of the University of Washington. Min Aung Hlaing, the boss of Myanmar’s ruling junta, visited injured people at a Naypyidaw hospital.
Thailand has been hit, too, though to a lesser extent. At least ten people have been reported killed in Bangkok when a skyscraper that was under construction collapsed. Rescuers are trying to free at least 81 people still trapped under the rubble. Water cascaded from the rooftop pools of tall buildings, as onlookers screamed. Thailand’s prime minister, Paetongtarn Shinawatra, declared Bangkok an “area of emergency” as streets filled with people who did not wish to return home, or to the office, for fear of aftershocks. The city’s metro system closed for the day, while surveyors checked it for damage.
The tremor took place on the Sagaing fault, one of the longest and most active of its kind; millions live along it. Earthquakes on “lateral” faults such as this (the San Andreas in California is another example) cannot reach the intensities of earthquakes seen at places where one plate over-rides another, such as the earthquake off the coast of Indonesia which triggered the Boxing Day tsunami in 2004 (magnitude 9.2) or the Tohoku earthquake which hit Japan in 2011 (magnitude 9.0-9.1). But these earthquakes can still be incredibly destructive, not least because they tend to take place at lesser depths; the focus of this one is estimated to have been just 10km deep. In such cases “the energy has not really dissipated much by the time it reaches the surface,” says Ian Watkinson, a geologist at Royal Holloway, London who has studied the fault.
In terms of likely damage, Dr Watkinson says that the 2023 Turkey earthquake—“a very similar earthquake in style and size”—might serve as a guide. The Turkish earthquake saw a large number of poorly built reinforced concrete buildings collapse, and Mandalay has no shortage of such. Another risk to the city is that it is built on the sedimentary plain of the Irrawaddy river. The shock is likely to have liquefied some of those sediments, a transformation which can cause surface structures to founder or can see sediment spurting out of the subsurface, producing “mud volcanoes”.
The quake in Myanmar will pile misery on the suffering already wrought by the country’s civil war, which began in 2021 when Myanmar’s armed forces launched a coup. The fighting has displaced more than 3.5m people in four years. Even before the earthquake, the United Nations estimated that 20m people, or 35% of the population, would require humanitarian aid this year, and that this would cost $1.1bn. Less than 5% of that sum had been raised by the time the ground began to shake.
This disaster comes only weeks after America slashed the assistance it sends to Myanmar, as part of the Trump administration’s broader retreat from foreign aid. In 2024 America paid for around one-third of all multilateral humanitarian assistance to Myanmar, including through support for people affected by Typhoon Yagi, which struck the country last November. USAID, America’s aid agency, spent $240m in Myanmar last year, with nearly half of it funding humanitarian causes. But since January the number of USAID programmes in Myanmar has shrunk from 18 to only three. Several NGOs and at least seven American-funded hospitals operating along Myanmar’s border with Thailand have shut down.
Myanmar’s junta, shunned by many countries for its savagery, made a rare appeal for help. The army may get it from allies including China, India and Russia, says Ms Callahan, but it will probably impose strict controls on aid, visas and travel permits so as to prevent it from reaching parts of the country that are held by rebels. Since the start of the conflict the junta has lost control of more than half of the country; these areas—including many affected by the earthquake—are now controlled by hundreds of disparate resistance groups. When Myanmar was hit by Cyclone Nargis in 2008, the paranoid generals in charge at the time were slow to accept foreign aid. That probably pushed up the death toll, which rose above 130,000.
Having survived the initial quakes, people in Myanmar and Thailand continue to worry for their safety. “There are concerns that a nearby dam may break, and we are worried about the possibility of another earthquake,” said Swe Nyein of World Vision International in Yangon. In Mandalay, a large number of decrepit buildings could yet collapse. Myanmar’s agony is growing ever deeper.
This story has been updated
State Of Emergency
Read breaking news, latest updates from US, UK, Pakistan and other countries across the world on topics related to politics,crime, and national affairs.
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