Earthquake rocks Southeast Asia

The toll from Myanmar's earthquake continues to rise, as foreign rescue teams and aid rushed into the impoverished country, where hospitals were overwhelmed and some communities scrambled to mount rescue efforts with limited resources.

The 7.7-magnitude quake, one of Myanmar's strongest in a century, jolted the war-torn Southeast Asian nation on Friday, leaving hundreds people dead and thousands injured, the military government said.

At least three people were killed in the town of Taungoo in Myanmar when a mosque partially collapsed, witnesses said. Local media reported at least two people died and 20 were injured after a hotel collapsed in Aung Ban.

The United States Geological Survey Earthquake Hazards Program, said on Friday that fatalities could be between 10,000 and 100,000 people, and the economic impact could be as high as 70% of Myanmar’s GDP.

Roger Musson, honorary research fellow at the British Geological Survey, told Reuters that the shallow depth of the quake meant the damage would be more severe. The quake’s epicentre was at a depth of just 10 km (6.2 miles), according to the USGS.

“This is very damaging because it has occurred at a shallow depth, so the shockwaves are not dissipated as they go from the focus of the earthquake up to the surface. The buildings received the full force of the shaking.”

“It’s important not to be focused on epicentres because the seismic waves don’t radiate out from the epicentre - they radiate out from the whole line of the fault,” he added.

Myanmar lies on the boundary between two tectonic plates and is one of the world’s most seismically active countries, although large and destructive earthquakes have been relatively rare in the Sagaing region.

“The plate boundary between the India Plate and Eurasia Plate runs approximately north-south, cutting through the middle of the country,” said Joanna Faure Walker, a professor and earthquake expert at University College London.

She said the plates move past each other horizontally at different speeds. While this causes “strike slip” quakes that are normally less powerful than those seen in “subduction zones” like Sumatra, where one plate slides under another, they can still reach magnitudes of 7 to 8.

Since overthrowing the elected civilian government of Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi in 2021, the military has struggled to run the country, leaving the economy and basic services like healthcare in tatters.

An armed opposition, comprising established ethnic armies and new resistance groups formed since the coup, has seized swathes of territory and driven the junta out of border areas, increasingly hemming it into the central lowlands.

The fighting has displaced more than three million people in Myanmar, with widespread food insecurity and over a third of the population in need of humanitarian assistance, according to the United Nations.

The country has also been hit by natural disasters in recent years, including Typhoon Yagi last year and Cyclone Mocha in 2023, and the internationally isolated junta has struggled to respond adequately.

Nyi Nyi Kyaw, a Myanmar academic at the University of Bristol, said the earthquake had struck “at a moment when Myanmar is at its most vulnerable ... in decades”.

Civil society had largely fled following the coup and those community-based organisations that remained were unable to manage the disaster relief effort, he said.

“In essence, Myanmar is wholly unable to deal with the shock and its aftermath,” he said.

The International Rescue Committee said shelter, food, water and medical help were all needed in places such as Mandalay, near the epicentre of the quake.

"Having lived through the terror of the earthquake, people now fear aftershocks and are sleeping outside on roads or in open fields," an IRC worker in Mandalay said in a report.

The civil war in Myanmar, where the junta seized power in a coup in 2021, has complicated efforts to reach those injured and made homeless by the Southeast Asian nation's biggest quake in a century.