KHOU 11 published March 28, 2025: 10,000 could die following 7.7 magnitude earthquake in Myanmar.
USGS said 10,000 people may die in the earthquake and the aftermath. Buildings and bridges toppled and hundreds were confirmed dead.
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The Guardian News, UK
written by Rebecca Ratcliffe in Bangkok, Esther J and agencies
Saturday March 29 2025 at 01:37 EDT
The death toll from a huge earthquake that hit Myanmar has reached more than 1,000, as rescuers dig through the rubble of collapsed buildings in a desperate search for survivors.
The shallow 7.7-magnitude quake struck northwest of the city of Sagaing in central Myanmar in the early afternoon, followed minutes later by a 6.7-magnitude aftershock.
The quake destroyed buildings, downed bridges, and buckled roads across swathes of Myanmar, with severe damage reported in the second biggest city, Mandalay.
The ruling junta said in a statement on Saturday 1,002 people had been confirmed dead and 2,376 injured, with most of the dead in Mandalay. The statement suggested the numbers could still rise, saying “detailed figures are still being collected.”
In neighbouring Thailand, which also felt tremors, Bangkok city authorities said so far six people had been found dead, 26 injured and 47 were still missing, most from a construction site near the capital’s popular Chatuchak market, where a high-rise building collapsed. Earlier statements had said 10 were confirmed dead and about 100 missing.
With communications badly disrupted in Myanmar, the true scale of the disaster has yet to emerge from the isolated military-ruled state, and the toll is expected to rise significantly.
It was the biggest quake to hit Myanmar in over a century, according to US geologists, and the tremors were powerful enough to severely damage buildings across Bangkok, hundreds of kilometres (miles) away from the epicentre.
Rescuers in the Thai capital laboured through the night searching for workers trapped when a 30-storey skyscraper under construction collapsed, reduced in seconds to a pile of rubble and twisted metal by the force of the shaking.
Bangkok city authorities said they will deploy more than 100 engineers to inspect buildings for safety after receiving over 2,000 reports of damage.
While there was no widespread destruction, the shaking brought some dramatic images of rooftop swimming pools sloshing their contents down the side of many of the city’s towering apartment blocks and hotels.
Even hospitals were evacuated, with one woman delivering her baby outdoors after being moved from a hospital building. A surgeon also continued to operate on a patient after evacuating, completing the operation outside, a spokesperson told AFP.
But the worst of the damage was in Myanmar, where four years of civil war sparked by a military coup have ravaged the healthcare and emergency response systems.
Junta chief Min Aung Hlaing issued an exceptionally rare appeal for international aid, indicating the severity of the calamity. Previous military regimes have shunned foreign assistance even after major natural disasters.
A 37-member team from the Chinese province of Yunnan reached the city of Yangon early on Saturday with earthquake detectors, drones and other supplies, the official Xinhua news agency reported.
Russia’s emergencies ministry dispatched two planes carrying 120 rescuers and supplies, according to a report from the Russian state news agency Tass.
India sent a search and rescue team and a medical team as well as provisions, while Malaysia’s foreign ministry said the country would send 50 people on Sunday to help identify and provide aid to the worst-hit areas.
The United Nations allocated $5m to start relief efforts. President Donald Trump said on Friday that the US was going to help with the response, but some experts were concerned about this effort given his administration’s deep cuts in foreign assistance.
The Trump administration’s cuts to the United States Agency for International Development have already forced the United Nations and non-governmental organisation to cut many programmes in Myanmar.
India, France and the European Union offered to provide assistance, while the WHO said it was mobilising to prepare trauma injury supplies.
Chinese President Xi Jinping had spoken to Min Aung Hlaing, the Chinese embassy said, while state media reported he had “expressed deep sorrow” over the destruction and said China was “willing to provide Myanmar the needed assistance to support people in affected areas”.
Myanmar declared a state of emergency across the six worst-affected regions after the quake, and at one major hospital in the capital, Naypyidaw, medics were forced to treat the wounded in the open air.
One official described it as a “mass casualty area”.
Mandalay, a city of more than 1.7 million people, appeared to have been badly hit. Photos showed dozens of buildings reduced to rubble.
A rescue worker from Amarapura, an ancient city and now a township of Mandalay, said the bodies of 30 people had been recovered from collapsed multistorey apartment blocks.
“I have never experienced anything like this before – our town looks like a collapsed city,” he said, estimating that about a fifth of the buildings had been destroyed.
A resident reached by phone told AFP that a hospital and a hotel had been destroyed, and said the city was badly lacking in rescue personnel.
Another witness in Mandalay, who asked not to be named, said eight people had been killed and others were feared to be trapped after a construction building in Pyigyitagon township collapsed.
“The whole of Mandalay city was affected by the earthquake. The rescue teams and hospitals are now overrun. We are managing with the resources we have in the neighbourhood,” they said.
Images published by Khit Thit Media, a news agency based in Myanmar, showed piles of bricks and rubble outside a damaged mosque, also in Mandalay. At least 20 people had died there, it reported, though it was not possible to verify this figure.
A huge queue of buses and lorries lined up at a checkpoint to enter Naypyidaw early on Saturday.
The Weather Network
written by Reuters
Friday March 28, 2025, 1:50 PM
BANGKOK - A powerful earthquake killed more than 140 people in Myanmar on Friday, authorities said, toppling buildings and wrecking infrastructure across a wide area, including a skyscraper under construction in neighbouring Thailand.
Much of the devastation was in Myanmar's second-largest city, Mandalay, which lies close to the epicentre of the 7.7 magnitude quake that struck at lunchtime and was followed by a powerful aftershock and several more moderate ones.
A rescue worker from Amarapura, an ancient city and now a township of Mandalay, said the bodies of 30 people had been recovered from collapsed multi-story apartment blocks.
"I have never experienced anything like this before - our town looks like a collapsed city," he said, estimating that about a fifth of the buildings had been destroyed.
"We received calls for help from people from the inside, but we cannot help because we do not have enough manpower and machines to remove the debris, but we will not stop working".
General Min Aung Hlaing, leader of Myanmar's military junta, said there would be more deaths and casualties and invited "any country" to provide help and donations.
Speaking at the White House later on Friday, U.S. President Donald Trump said he had spoken with officials in Myanmar and that his administration would be providing some form of assistance. "We're going to be helping," he told reporters.
Despite the administration's push to shut the U.S. Agency for International Development and cut nearly all remaining jobs, State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce said USAID disaster experts were ready to help, including with items such as food and potable water.
"USAID has maintained a team of disaster experts with the capacity to respond if disaster strikes," she told a press briefing. "We are ready to move now. There has been no impact on our ability to perform those duties, those requests for aid, if and when they come in."
In the Thai capital Bangkok, an official said at least nine people had been killed. Rescuers were searching through the rubble of the tower block that collapsed.
Mandalay, with a population of about 1.5 million, is Myanmar's ancient royal capital and the centre of its Buddhist heartland. Rescue workers were trying to reach dozens of monks trapped under rubble in the Phaya Taung Monastery, said the emergency worker in Amarapura. Buildings, bridges and roads were wrecked, residents and local media said.
State-run MRTV said at least 144 people had been killed in Myanmar and 732 injured.
The junta is locked in a struggle to put down insurgents fighting its rule, a situation that is likely to complicate the rescue and relief operation.
"We all ran out of the house as everything started shaking," a Mandalay resident told Reuters. "I witnessed a five-storey building collapse in front of my eyes. Everyone in my town is out on the road and no one dares to go back inside."
A rescue worker from the Moe Saydanar charity told Reuters it had retrieved at least 60 bodies from monasteries and buildings in Pyinmana, near the capital Naypyidaw, and more people were trapped.
In the purpose-built capital itself, a 1,000-bed hospital sustained damage and roads were left with huge fissures, state media reported.
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said the United Nations was mobilising in Southeast Asia to help those in need.
Zin Mar Aung, the diplomatic spokesperson for the opposition National Unity Government, said fighters from the anti-junta militias known as the People's Defence Forces would provide humanitarian help.
A U.S. government analysis based on the strength and depth of the quake estimated there could be thousands of deaths and severe economic loss, with the Sagaing and Meiktila regions worst hit.
State media said the quake caused the collapse of buildings in five cities and towns, as well as a railway bridge and a road bridge on the Yangon-Mandalay Expressway. Images showed the destroyed Ava Bridge over the Irrawaddy River, its arches leaning into the water.
A Mandalay resident said destruction stretched across the whole city, and one neighbourhood, Sein Pan, was on fire.
Roads were damaged, phone lines disrupted and there was no electricity, said the resident, who declined to be named.
At least three people died after a mosque in Taungoo partially collapsed, two witnesses said.
"We were saying prayers when the shaking started... Three died on the spot," one said.
Local media reported a hotel in Aung Ban, in Shan state, crumbled into rubble, with the Democratic Voice of Burma reporting two people had died and 20 were trapped.
Worst time
Amnesty International said the earthquake could not have come at a worse time for Myanmar, given the number of displaced people, the existing need for relief aid, and cuts to U.S. aid by the Trump administration.
Restricted media access meant a clear picture of the extent of damage and loss might not emerge for some time, the group's Myanmar researcher, Joe Freeman, said.
Since overthrowing the elected civilian government of Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi in 2021, the military has struggled to run Myanmar, leaving the economy and basic services including healthcare in tatters.
An armed opposition, comprising established ethnic armies and new resistance groups formed since the coup, has seized swathes of territory and driven the junta out of border areas, increasingly hemming it into the central lowlands.
The fighting has displaced more than three million people in Myanmar, with widespread food insecurity and over a third of the population in need of humanitarian assistance, the U.N. says.
Myanmar has also been hit by natural disasters in recent years, and the internationally isolated junta has struggled to respond adequately. It lies on the boundary of two tectonic plates and is among the world's most seismically active countries.
Nyi Nyi Kyaw, a Myanmar academic at the University of Bristol, said Myanmar was "wholly unable to deal with the shock and its aftermath" due to the breakdown in civil society.
In Bangkok, people ran onto the streets in panic, among them hotel guests in bathrobes and swimming costumes, as water cascaded down from an elevated pool at a luxury hotel.
Of the confirmed casualties in the Thai capital, eight died in the building collapse and a ninth at another location, Bangkok Deputy Governor Tavida Kamolvej said. The rescue operation at the building site said over 100 people were missing.
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