Millions of mobile phones rang out yesterday morning in Taiwan with an automated earthquake alert message. Moments later, lights, bookshelves and walls shook throughout the island – for more than a minute – as they had not shaken in a quarter of a century. The announced tsunami never materialized, but in Hualien, on the eastern coast – just 25 kilometers from the epicenter – 28 buildings were brought to their knees by the telluric claw – a magnitude 7.2 earthquake – even though that did not collapse. It took the Taiwanese a few hours to get an idea of the damage. By dusk, firefighters were only confirming nine dead, 946 injured and a hundred people trapped or missing, including the 50 occupants of several minibuses in Taroko National Park.
At least three of the dead were hikers due to an avalanche on a slope in the eastern region of Hualien. In the same area, a lorry driver died inside the vehicle, due to rock fall next to a tunnel. Another driver would have been crushed to death as well.
In Hualien, the mudslide earthquake was classified as a higher grade 6, on a scale of intensity ranging from 1 to 7. This city, with more than one hundred thousand inhabitants, was practically isolated from the rest of the country, due to the numerous cuts and obstructions to roads and railways, including the one linking the capital, Taipei, with the south of the country, along the eastern seaboard. So much so that the Government had to enable a ferry, which will start operating for cars from today, and for passengers, from tomorrow, between Hualien and Yilan.
All this, at the gates of a four-day bridge, coinciding with the Chinese festival of Qingming, or cleaning the tombs of the ancestors, which begins today. Some days that many Taiwanese dedicate, precisely, to going out into the countryside or the mountains. Activity explicitly discouraged by the Government, in view of the 123 aftershocks recorded in the first twelve hours. The acting president, Tsai Ing-wen, asked the population to remain calm.
Meanwhile, in Japan, where there was also an evacuation of coastal areas in Okinawa, he breathed a sigh of relief after an hour, after observing that the possible tsunami was reduced to a wave of one and a half feet. The earthquake was felt in mainland China's Fujian province, but there was also no damage.
In the old Formosa, on the other hand, the army had to lend a hand in the clearing tasks. In Taipei, subway service was disrupted for an hour, while forty flights were canceled or diverted to the main airport, where part of the roof had collapsed. In an underground hangar of the Air Force in Hualien – the construction of which cost 800 million euros – eight F-16 fighters suffered damage to the fuselage. Across the island, 87,000 homes were still without electricity at the end of the day. And in several areas, telephone coverage was also affected.
The depression brought to mind the devastating earthquake of 1999, with a magnitude of 7.6, which killed 2,416 people. Since then, the island has made a lot of progress in anti-seismic measures, applied to construction, as the relatively small number of victims and the moderation of damage, in the face of a similar attack, would demonstrate. So much so that the majority of fatalities occurred in open countryside or, to make matters worse, in national parks, while densely populated Taiwanese cities barely licked their wounds.
The epicenter of the earthquake was located in the sea, at a depth of 15 kilometers. Just six years ago, another smaller earthquake also struck Hualien, killing 17 and injuring 285. He also left a geopolitical anecdote, when the sovereignist government of Taipei rejected the assistance offered by the People's Republic of China, "because it was not necessary", before accepting the offer by Japan, the former colonizing power, "for its technological sophistication".
