Bangkok Has New Fears About Excessive-Rise Buildings After Myanmar Earthquake

When the earth began rocking beneath her dwelling in Bangkok on Friday, Kanittha Thepasak thought she was merely dizzy. Then she heard an odd creaking sound, noticed a lamp shifting and threw apart a curtain to search out automobiles swaying like boats at sea.

The streets have been stuffed with individuals who had rushed exterior, staring up on the house buildings, glass workplace towers and unfinished building throughout them. Now Ms. Kanittha can barely think about returning to the workplace the place she spends most of her days. It’s on the twenty ninth ground.

“I’m freaked out, I’m apprehensive,” she mentioned. “Thai folks don’t have any fundamental understanding of earthquakes as a result of we by no means actually expertise them.”

The quake that devastated Myanmar on Friday did far much less harm in neighboring Thailand, however the sheer power of it — with a magnitude of seven.7 — emptied Bangkok, a metropolis of towers, into the streets. On Sunday, two days later, because the Thai authorities and engineers inspected a whole bunch of broken constructions to make sure they could possibly be occupied, it was nonetheless darkening ideas of routines that more and more embrace dwelling and dealing dozens of tales above floor.

The catastrophe’s most devastating scene in Thailand got here from the whole collapse of a Bangkok constructing that had been below building. Not less than 11 staff have been reported lifeless as of Sunday, and with about 75 nonetheless unaccounted for, rescue crews continued to tug rigorously on the rubble with a dozen excavators and eight canine skilled to search out the lifeless and the dwelling.