Earthquake

I didn’t hear about it until maybe two and a half hours later. A friend called out to me, saying a devastating earthquake had struck Burma, in a region known as Sagaing, not far from Mandalay. She also mentioned that reports said tremors were felt as far away as Bangkok, where a building had collapsed. Even with this information, I wasn’t quite ready to grasp the gravity of the disaster—not until I got home that night.

Social media was flooded with images and videos, and they were all bad. Roads had cracked open, buildings had crumbled, Buddhist pagodas and stupas severely damaged and general devastation stretching across the affected areas. The pictures trickling out of Burma painted a grim scene. The earthquake measured 7.7 on the Richter scale, followed by several aftershocks, including a powerful 6.4 aftershock about half an hour later. The Sagaing fault line had shifted horizontally—the Indian plate pushing north, the Eurasian plate grinding south. This fault line, by the way, is part of the Pacific Ring of Fire and roughly extends down to the west of Sumatra. Possibly connected to the fault that caused the massive 2004 earthquake off Sumatra, which triggered the devastating tsunami that impacted nearly half the world.

As this earthquake struck on land, there was no tsunami. A small relief, but a relief nonetheless. Even so, destruction wasn’t limited to Burma. In Bangkok, nearly 1,000 kilometres away, a multi-storey building under construction collapsed, and the footage was chilling indeed, bringing into question the techniques deployed by the architect, structural engineers and contractors. Even the developer. If a building under construction can collapse, what guarantees are that it would be structurally safe once construction had completed and the building occupied? In China, some damage were recorded in Yunnan province. So far, reports estimate more than 1,600 lives lost across the two countries, but this number is almost certain to rise as more information emerges from Burma.

Let’s keep the people of Burma in our thoughts and prayers. They’ll need every bit of strength in the days ahead.