Myanmar, Thailand rescuers race to find more survivors days after deadly earthquake
Pregnant woman among 4 rescued in Mandalay, Myanmar on Monday
Survivors were pulled out of rubble in Myanmar and signs of life were detected in the ruins of a skyscraper in Bangkok on Monday as efforts intensified to find people trapped three days after a massive earthquake in Southeast Asia that has now killed over 2,000 people.
Rescuers freed four people, including a pregnant woman and a girl, from collapsed buildings in Mandalay, the city in central Myanmar near the epicentre of Friday's 7.7-magnitude earthquake, China's Xinhua news agency reported.
China is among Myanmar's neighbours and one of several countries to provide aid and personnel in the rescue effort.
"It doesn't matter how long we work. The most important thing is that we can bring hope to the local people," said Yue Xin, head of the China Search and Rescue Team that pulled people out of the rubble in Mandalay, Xinhua reported.
Drone footage of the city showed a huge, multi-storey building pancaked into layers of concrete, but some gilded temples were still standing.
The death toll from the quake in Myanmar has reached 2,065 with more than 3,900 injured and over 270 missing, the country's state television channel MRTV said.
Thai officials believe there are signs of life at site
In the Thai capital Bangkok, rescuers pulled out another body from the rubble of a skyscraper that was under construction, bringing the death toll from the building's collapse to 12, with a total of 19 dead across Thailand and 75 still missing at the building site.
Bangkok Gov. Chadchart Sittipunt said rescuers are not giving up despite the conventional-wisdom three-day window for finding people alive fast approaching.
"The search will continue even after 72 hours because in Turkey, people who have been trapped for a week have survived," Chadchart said, referring to a 2023 earthquake in which several people were removed, alive, after spending more than a week under rubble.
He said machine scans of the rubble indicated there may still be people alive underneath, and dog sniffers are being dispatched to try to pinpoint their locations.
"We've detected weak life signs and there are many spots," he said.
Aid efforts complicated
The military government has declared a week-long mourning period from Monday.
The United Nations said it was rushing relief supplies to survivors in central Myanmar.
"Our teams in Mandalay are joining efforts to scale up the humanitarian response despite going through the trauma themselves," said Noriko Takagi, the UN refugee agency's representative in Myanmar. "Time is of the essence as Myanmar needs global solidarity and support through this immense devastation."
The effects of the civil war resulting from the 2021 coup were complicating efforts to reach those injured and made homeless by the Southeast Asian nation's biggest quake in a century, according to aid groups.
"Access to all victims is an issue … given the conflict situation. There are a lot of security issues to access some areas across the front lines in particular," Arnaud de Baecque, resident representative of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Myanmar, told Reuters.
One rebel group said Myanmar's ruling military was still conducting airstrikes on villages in the aftermath of the quake, and Singapore's foreign minister called for an immediate ceasefire to help relief efforts.
Critical infrastructure — including bridges, highways, airports and railways — across the country of 55 million lie damaged, slowing humanitarian efforts while the conflict that has battered the economy, displaced over 3.5 million people and debilitated the health system rages on.
The United States pledged $2 million in aid "through Myanmar-based humanitarian assistance organizations." It said in a statement that an emergency response team from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which is undergoing massive cuts under the Donald Trump administration, is deploying to Myanmar.
But the administration had previously proposed steep cuts to USAID, with potentially hundreds of millions of dollars at stake for Myanmar. According to Human Rights Myanmar, an aid group, the U.S. accounted for a quarter of all aid to Myanmar before Trump was inaugurated, and U.S. assistance was seen as crucial for the Rohingya refugees who fled the country and languish in camps in Thailand and Bangladesh.