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.
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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 another body from the rubble of the unfinished skyscraper that collapsed in the quake, bringing the death toll from the building collapse to 12, with a total of 19 dead across Thailand and 75 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.
Bangkok Governor Chadchart Sittipunt said there had been past cases in which survivors had been found after a week.
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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
