Bangkok: Athitaya Yuenyao poses awkwardly for a photo on the second day of her new job.
The rudimentary group selfie with her team is a kind of proof of attendance, performed daily and perfunctorily by the contractors building the auditor-general’s new office tower in northern Bangkok. It is not the style to smile or ham it up.
Athitaya Yuenyao, 22, with her team of electricians on the day of the earthquake.
Athitaya Yuenyao, 22, with her team of electricians on the day of the earthquake.Credit: WhatsApp
But behind the 22-year-old’s deadpan and faintly nervous expression, she is probably quite pleased. Only two weeks earlier, Athitaya had been living with her grandmother in the north-eastern Thai province of Yasothon working odd jobs. Now, she was helping a crew of electricians on a skyscraper, “earning her own money”, her aunties say. This is what she had come to Bangkok to do.
Athitaya and her new workmates had just finished breakfast and were about to begin work on the tower’s seventh floor when their team leader snapped this picture. The timestamp reads 7.50am, March 28: 5½ hours before an earthquake – whose epicentre was more than 1300 kilometres away in Myanmar – brought the tower down, killing and trapping those still inside.
Athitaya’s teammates made it out. She has not.
This masthead spoke to her three aunties as they waited at a pop-up tent area for families of the missing. One of aunts, Kanika Patomwan, had just been weeping into her phone.
“I was talking to my husband to update him on the situation,” she explains. “I told him we had been informed by officials … that they wanted DNA from her brother to help identify her body.”
Unlike some others at the camp, the aunties have lost hope that their beloved niece will come out of the rubble alive.
“We are taking her home to Yasothon,” Kanika says.
The search for the missing entered its fourth full day on Tuesday. If it wasn’t already the case, it is now thought unlikely there will be further survivors.
A “signal” from inside the mound of debris on Monday afternoon, thought to be a heartbeat or movement, led rescuers to another dead body. That’s 13 recovered now, with 74 people still unaccounted for.
The true death toll may be more than 100. The numbers represented on the whiteboard next to the scene are only those documented as working at the site. Dozens more low-skilled migrants from Myanmar and Cambodia may have been working unregistered.
The State Audit Office, which was to occupy the building once it was finished in August, delivered the building’s data and documents to rescuers on Monday afternoon. Why it took this long, more than three days since the collapse, is anyone’s guess.
The Thai government also said it had still not been able to reach all of the 20 contractor companies, some of them based abroad, for details about their people working inside.
Search and rescue officials said on Monday that a special scanner has identified about 70 bodies clustered between the 17th and 21st floors. Still, even as the heavier machinery rolls in and the authorities talk more of “bodies” than “survivors”, some at the camp are clinging to hope.
Suchat Chaobangmon is one of them. He is waiting at the camp for good news about his sister, Sriwan Oui-wong, and her husband, Chatchawan Thongput.
“If my sister can’t make it, she should visit me in my dreams,” Suchat says. “She hasn’t come to say goodbye to me yet.”
Chatchawan, the team leader, Sriwan and the four other members of their electrician crew were thought to be on the 27th floor when the building collapsed. Their group selfie from that morning shows a car in the background, meaning that they were possibly moving around throughout the day.
Workers missing in the Bangkok tower rubble. Team leader Chatchawan Thongput is at the front and his wife, Sriwan Oui-wong, is behind his left shoulder. Back row (L-R): Kitti Pinthapthim (Thailand), Maung Kyaw Htat (Myanmar), Ratana Phalla (Cambodia) and Kyi Than (Myanmar).
Workers missing in the Bangkok tower rubble. Team leader Chatchawan Thongput is at the front and his wife, Sriwan Oui-wong, is behind his left shoulder. Back row (L-R): Kitti Pinthapthim (Thailand), Maung Kyaw Htat (Myanmar), Ratana Phalla (Cambodia) and Kyi Than (Myanmar).
The families of this missing team are among about 50 people sleeping at the makeshift camp amid the constant din of backhoes and graders a couple of hundred metres away.
A foundation has set up a tent with 37 beds, but there are not enough left for all of this group, so the spouses, brothers, sisters and vacant-faced teenage girls are sleeping on blankets laid out next to shopping centre vending machines.
“Yesterday, we prayed at the site, asking the spirit of this place to guide the way for those still stuck and help bring them out alive,” says Naruemol Thonglek, the wife of missing Myanmar man Kyi Than.
“On the first day, we were all very hopeful. As the days go by, our hope is fading.”
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Zach Hope is South-East Asia correspondent. He is a former reporter at the Brisbane Times.Connect via email.