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Hopes of finding additional survivors from an earthquake in Taiwan are fading after rescuers find two more bodies in a partially collapsed hotel and detect no signs of a missing family of five.
Key points:
- The death toll sits at 12, with five still missing and 273 injured
- Collapsed Yunmen Tsuiti building is being supported by steel beams after quake jolts it to a 45-degree angle
- Previous reports of signs of life in a hotel were deemed to be false
Rescuers broke through to a room in the Beauty Inn where a couple — Canadian citizens originally from Hong Kong — were found.
The deaths of the couple, both 49, raises the death toll to 12, including four tourists from China and a 27-year-old Filipino employed as a household helper.
Taiwan's National Fire Agency listed 273 people as injured.
The hotel, located on the lower floors of the 12-storey Yunmen Tsuiti building, had almost entirely collapsed.
The building itself was leaning at a 45-degree angle, forcing crews to stabilize it with steel beams.
The Yunmen Tsuiti building was one of several damaged by the magnitude-6.4 earthquake that struck on Tuesday in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Hualien county, whose economy is heavily dependent on tourism.
Hundreds of rescuers were on the scene, including a team from Japan deploying cutting-edge equipment that can detect a heartbeat within a 15–metre range.
Taiwanese broadcasters said earlier indications that signs of life had been detected turned out to be false.
The others missing in the hotel are five members of a family from China, including parents, grandparents and their 12-year-old son.
Authorities said they would focus their search on the single building where the five missing were believed to be.
"The military will continue to prioritise today rescuing the missing people in the Yun Men Tsui Ti residential building," it said in a statement.
The building's extreme displacement made the search tough, the Government said in a statement, adding: "The space for our operations is small, so the progress of search and rescue can be slow."
Local TV stations also reported rescuers had detected the smell of decaying corpses.
Taiwan's President Tsai Ing-wen visited those sheltering in schools and other sites as a safeguard against repeated aftershocks.
Taiwan has frequent earthquakes, most of them minor, but a 1999 quake killed more than 2,300 people and was Taiwan's worst recent natural disaster.
Reuters/AP
Topics: disasters-and-accidents, earthquake, taiwan, asia