Rocks lying on a road in Chiayi County, central Taiwan, after the 6.2-magnitude earthquake yesterday.
TAIPEI: A strong earthquake hit Taiwan yesterday, leaving two dead, one missing and 21 injured, officials said.
Another earthquake jolted the southern Philippines late Saturday, injuring at least 33 people and damaging more than 140 houses.
The tremor that hit Taiwan yesterday afternoon violently shook buildings in the capital Taipei, sending people running into the streets and was also felt in Hong Kong, more than 700km away.
Taiwan’s Seismology Centre measured the quake’s magnitude at 6.3, while the US Geological Survey put it at 6.2.
The tremor hit at 1:43 pm (0543 GMT), centred 32km east of the central county of Nantou at a depth of 10km, followed by a series of aftershocks, the Seismology Centre said.
The National Fire Agency said a mountain climber was killed after he was hit by falling rocks on Mount Ali in central Taiwan, while the second victim also died after being knocked down by falling rocks.
In Chushan town of Nantou county, rescuers were running against time, digging through tonnes of rubble which buried a male angler.
“The rescuers have been working hard to search and rescue the missing person, even though, I’m afraid, the odds of finding him alive is slim,” a National Fire Agency official said.
Twenty-one people were injured, including three severely, the agency said.
TV footage showed widespread landslides, stirring clouds of yellow dust, on other mountains in the area.
Comprehensive cracks were seen on the walls of the houses and highways there, they said.
TV stations also reported that panic-stricken shoppers were seen running out of a 12-storey department store in the central city of Taichung.
The fire agency said that four helicopters had been sent to scout the area around the epicentre as authorities waited for any further damage information.
Six high-speed trains were halted but services resumed after no damage was found to the line.
More than 20,000 travellers were affected as 54 trains were delayed after the quake, the Taiwan Railways Administration said.
Operations at the three nuclear power plants on the island were not affected, according to state-owned Taiwan Power Co.
“This is the biggest earthquake to hit this year. As the origin of the quake was shallow and it happened in the centre of the island, its velocity could be felt islandwide,” Lu Pei-ling, deputy chief of the seismology centre, told reporters.
“Today’s earthquake was somewhat related to the 1999 one.”
Nantou county was the epicentre of a 7.6-magnitude quake in September 21, 1999 that killed around 2,400 people in the deadliest natural disaster in the island’s recent history.
In late March, a strong earthquake in the same vicinity as Sunday’s tremor killed one person and injured 86 others. Violent shock waves damaged buildings and triggered two blazes.
Taiwan lies near the junction of two tectonic plates and is regularly hit by earthquakes.
In the southern Philippines, a magnitude-5.7 earthquake rattled North Cotabato province and nearby areas late Saturday as people slept, damaging more than 140 houses and several school buildings and setting off a landslide that partially blocked a road with boulders, officials said.
At least 33 people, including children, were injured by collapsed walls and falling debris in the hard-hit North Cotabato villages of Kimadzil and Kibugtongan, said Hermes Daquipa, a Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology official who joined a government team that surveyed the hilly villages. The quake, which was set off by the movement of a nearby fault, damaged the approaches to two bridges and concrete pipes that cut off water supply to the two villages.
Some of the damaged school buildings will not be able to be used for today’s resumption of classes after a summer break for safety reasons, North Cotabato Governor Emmylou Tolentino-Mendoza said.
Many residents remained jittery yesterday because of continuing aftershocks, said Mendoza, who added that she scrambled out of her home like other villagers when the ground started to shake and objects fell from shelves.
“It’s a big relief that no motorist was passing through our highway when boulders rolled down from the mountainside,” she said.
The Philippine archipelago is located in the Pacific “Ring of Fire,” where earthquakes and volcanic activity are common. A magnitude-7.7 quake killed nearly 2,000 people on the northern island of Luzon in 1990.
Agencies
