Rescuers were working today to reach five people trapped and more than 80 people unaccounted for in several buildings damaged by a strong earthquake near Taiwan's eastern coast.
The shallow, magnitude 6.4 quake late Tuesday night caused at least four buildings in worst-hit Hualien county to cave in and tilt dangerously, killing four people.
Video footage and photos showed several midsized buildings leaning at sharp angles, their lowest floors crushed into mangled heaps of concrete, shattered glass, bent iron beams and other debris. Firefighters could be seen climbing ladders hoisted against windows as they sought to reach residents inside apartments.
The quake injured 243 people, two dozen of them critically, in Hualien county, Taiwan's Central News Agency reported.
The force of the tremor buckled roads and disrupted electricity and water supplies to thousands of households, the National Fire Agency said.
Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen moved to reassure the Taiwanese public that every effort would be made to look for survivors.
In a post on her official Facebook page, Tsai said she arrived in Hualien today to review rescue efforts.
Tsai said she "ordered search and rescue workers not to give up on any opportunity to save people, while keeping their own safety in mind."
"This is when the Taiwanese people show their calm, resilience and love," she wrote.
"The government will work with everyone to guard their homeland."
Emily Clarke and her friends live in Wellington, so have been through a few quakes, but 'this one was definitely bigger'.
The official news agency said all but two of the 145 people who could not be reached might be in the Yunmen Cuiti building, a 12-story apartment building, though it said it did not immediately have an estimate of how many were trapped.
The U.S. Geological Survey said the quake struck just before midnight Tuesday about 21 kilometers northeast of Hualien at a relatively shallow depth of about 10.6 kilometers.
Taiwan has frequent earthquakes due to its position along the "Ring of Fire," the seismic faults encircling the Pacific Ocean where most of the world's earthquakes occur.
Exactly two years earlier, a magnitude 6.4 quake collapsed an apartment complex in southern Taiwan, killing 115 people.
Five people involved in the construction of the complex were later found guilty of negligence and given prison sentences.
A magnitude 7.6 quake in central Taiwan killed more than 2,300 people in 1999.
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