Footage shows family stuck under rubble, waiting for rescue

Incredible stories of survival in Myanmar after last week’s devastating earthquake are giving rescuers a glimmer of hope as they continue to search for people in the rubble.

The death toll in the country from Friday’s 7.7-magnitude quake has risen to more than 2700 and is now expected to exceed 3000. China and Russia have sent emergency teams into the country, which is in the grip of a civil war, to help with rescue efforts. United Nations officials have called on the global community to send more aid quickly, before the looming monsoon season worsens already catastrophic conditions.

Rescuers are drawing hope from the fact they are still finding survivors under the rubble, even after the closure of the so-called “golden” 72-hour window for finding people alive. Those rescued include a 63-year-old woman pulled from the rubble of a building in Myanmar’s capital on Tuesday, 91 hours after she was buried.

On Monday, rescuers freed four people, including a pregnant woman and a girl, from collapsed buildings in the city of Mandalay. Video from China’s state broadcaster CCTV showed Chinese rescue workers in red helmets lowering the pregnant woman on a zip line from a mountain of shattered concrete and twisted metal before carrying her away as crowds cheered.

Another showed Chinese rescuers pulling the child from the debris of the collapsed Sky Apartment building after being trapped for more than 60 hours.

Chinese teams also rescued an elderly man on Sunday after nearly 40 hours stuck under the rubble of Ottara Thiri Private Hospital, CCTV reported, while emergency workers amputated a woman’s leg in an attempt to free her from a collapsed Mandalay apartment building, but she was pronounced dead shortly afterwards, London’s The Telegraph said.

A woman and her two grandchildren, apparently trapped in a pocket of debris inside a Mandalay apartment complex, were also rescued, Nine News reported, after filming themselves shouting and tapping to attract attention.

Another man, trapped for two days lying between layers of concrete, was rescued by a team from Singapore, Nine said.

One survivor in Mandalay said that after rescue workers pulled him out of the rubble of his restaurant, he rented a bulldozer with his own money to try to find the body of one of his workers and make the building safe for his neighbours.

The civil war in Myanmar, where a military junta seized power in a coup in 2021, is complicating efforts to reach those injured and made homeless by the South-East Asian nation’s biggest quake in a century.

Survival after an earthquake depends on many factors, including weather and access to water and air. If their injuries aren’t too severe, victims can survive for a week or more, assuming the weather isn’t too hot or cold, experts say.

Trapped victims are more likely to survive if they are in a debris-free pocket that prevents major injury while they await rescue, like under a sturdy desk, geophysicist Victor Tsai from Brown University said. Experts call this a survivable void space.

If fire, smoke or hazardous chemicals were released as a result of the building collapse, that may decrease a person’s survival odds, emergency response expert Dr Joseph Barbera, an associate professor at George Washington University, said.

Beyond that, having air to breathe and water to drink are crucial as the days go on.

“You could survive a while without food,” Barbera said. “You could survive less without water.”

Temperatures where someone is trapped may affect survival, and temperatures outside the rubble can affect rescue missions. A lack of heavy machinery has slowed search-and-rescue operations in Myanmar, forcing many to dig for survivors by hand in daily temperatures above 40 degrees Celsius.

It could be important for survivors to receive vital medical care before they were removed from the rubble, Barbera said. If not, the build-up of toxins from crushed muscles could make them go into shock after they were rescued.

In neighbouring Thailand on Monday, rescuers pulled two bodies from the rubble of the unfinished skyscraper that collapsed in the quake, bringing the death toll from the building collapse to 13, with a total of 20 dead across Thailand and 74 still missing at the Bangkok building site.

On Monday, signs of life were detected in the rubble of the 30-storey building, with scanning machines and sniffer dogs deployed as rescuers urgently tried to work out how to access the area, but it turned out to be a false alarm.

Bangkok Governor Chadchart Sittipunt said there had been past cases in which survivors had been found after a week.

After the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, a teenager and his 80-year-old grandmother were found alive after nine days trapped in their flattened home. And the year before, a 16-year-old Haitian girl was rescued from earthquake rubble in Port-Au-Prince after 15 days.

AP, Reuters