(Reuters) — The mayor of the southern Taiwanese city of Tainan said on Monday (February 8) that more people were feared trapped inside the rubble of a collapsed apartment block than first thought.
Speaking to journalists beside the building, which was toppled by an earthquake on Saturday (February 6), William Lai said rescuers had corrected upwards the number of people still thought to be inside.
“As of now the number of people trapped inside 124. This number has increased because after we entered, the search and rescue personnel found out that there were people who were not registered as living there. So this number will keep increasing,” he said.
Rescuers pulled out an eight-year-old girl alive from the rubble on Monday afternoon, more than 60 hours after the earthquake.
The girl, named as Lin Su-Chin, was conscious and had been taken to hospital, Taiwan television stations said, adding there were possibly two other people still alive in the wrecked building.
But Lai warned that the rescue operations was becoming increasingly difficult.
“To add to (the difficulty of) this, because of the limited number in rescue workers and limited cable reach of equipment, we cannot enter the place where we have detected (signs of) life. So we will use the big metal shovel from this (more remote) place to open up another access point,” he said.
The official death toll from the quake has now risen to 38.
The quake struck at about 4 a.m. on Saturday (2000 GMT Friday) at the beginning of the Lunar New Year holiday, with almost all the dead found in Tainan’s toppled Wei-guan Golden Dragon Building.
Rescuers continued to scramble over the twisted wreckage of the building as numbed family members stood around, waiting for news of missing relatives.
Taiwan’s government said in a statement 36 of the 38 dead were from the Wei-guan building, which was built in 1994.
Reuters witnesses at the scene of the collapse saw large rectangular, commercial cans of cooking-oil packed inside wall cavities exposed by the damage, apparently having been used as building material.
