tremors felt 640 miles away in Bangkok

“We were out by the pool on the 11th floor at the Rembrandt Hotel and my girlfriend asked me if the floor was moving when she was lying on the bed. And then suddenly I realised it was also moving,” Kurt Bull, from Norwich, said.

He is spending ten days on holiday in Thailand with his Swedish partner, Sigrid.

“Then the building beside the Rembrandt started moving a lot and was really creaking,” he said. “You could hear cracking of the structure, and the smaller glass windows were popping out at the side of the building.

“When we went to leave the pool area, all of the tiles and some of the roof in the stairwell had come down and smashed all over the floor, and I had no shoes with me so I was barefoot, so I didn’t want to go through the tower.”

Experts are warning that getting humanitarian relief into the worst-affected areas of Myanmar is likely to be politically difficult.

“In 2008, Cyclone Nargis killed over 130,000 people in the country. The government took days to accept significant aid and then inhibited its delivery,” said Ilan Kelman, professor of disasters and health at University College London.

“Helping people in need without helping an oppressive government is a tricky situation for aid donors to navigate, not helped by the reported damage to transportation and communication systems.”

Better building standards might have allowed people to escape structures that fell, he said, adding that the scale of the disaster would reflect failures of governance before the earthquake. “The usual mantra is that earthquakes don’t kill people, collapsing infrastructure does. Governments are responsible for planning regulations and building codes.”

One of the injured people at the hospital in Naypyidaw

SAI AUNG MAIN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Hundreds of injured people in Naypyidaw, Myanmar’s capital, rushed to a big hospital only to find its emergency department heavily damaged.

“Many injured people have been arriving, I haven’t seen anything like this before,” a doctor at the hospital told AFP. “We are trying to handle the situation. I’m so exhausted.”

Some victims sat stunned with their heads in their hands, blood caking their faces and limbs, the news agency reported. A security official at the hospital said: “Hundreds of injured people are arriving … but the emergency building here also collapsed.”

The head of Myanmar’s junta, General Min Aung Hlaing, visited the hospital earlier this morning.

Buildings in the region are “unlikely to be designed against seismic forces”

Local infrastructure in Myanmar and some parts of Thailand are “unlikely to be designed against seismic forces”, a leading seismologist told The Times, amid fears this could result in higher casualties.

Dr Roger Musson, an honorary research fellow at the British Geological Survey, said: “Large earthquakes in this region are rare but not unknown, the last similar event being in 1956.

“This means that buildings are unlikely to be designed against seismic forces, and therefore are more vulnerable when an earthquake like this occurs, resulting in more damage and higher casualties.

“The ultimate cause of the earthquake is the northward movement of the Indian plate, which produces a tearing effect along N-S trending vertical faults.”

Emergency services workers treat the injured at a hospital in Naypyidaw

SAI AUNG MAIN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

At least four people were killed when a mosque partially collapsed in Myanmar, a witness told Reuters.

“We got four bodies so far. There can be more. We are arranging the rescues and funeral now. The collapse happened right before the prayer. People ran out. Some couldn’t,” one of the people in the town of Taungoo, in the Bago region, told the news agency.

Another said: “We were saying prayers when the shaking started … three died on the spot.”

Patients were treated outdoors at a hospital in Bangkok after the quake

RUNGROJ YONGRIT/EPA

Two people were killed and seven have been rescued from a collapsed building in Bangkok, according to emergency responders.

The Thai capital has now been declared a disaster area by Bangkok’s city hall, according to a report by the news agency AP.

Myanmar’s junta, which seized control of government from the democratically elected National League for Democracy in 2021, has declared a state of emergency in six regions.

The junta’s chief, General Min Aung Hlaing, has arrived at a hospital in Naypyidaw where wounded people are being treated. The junta has made a rare request for international humanitarian aid.

The Thai deputy prime minister has said no state of emergency has been declared in Bangkok, despite some earlier news reports. However, Anutin Charnvirakul described the situation as serious.

An injured man is rescued from a construction site

LILLIAN SUWANRUMPHA/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

There have been more reports from a big hospital in Naypyidaw, the capital of Myanmar, which an official described as a “mass casualty area”.

Speaking to the news agency AFP, the official said there were rows of wounded being treated outside the emergency department of the 1,000-bed general hospital. They said some people were writhing in pain and others were lying still as relatives sought to comfort them.

More than 20 children are reported to be trapped in a school in the city of Taungoo, in central Myanmar, after the building collapsed.

Charitable organisations are trying to rescue the trapped children, according to the Yangon Times, a Myanmar newspaper, which said that the Welu Wan school had been sheltering displaced people.

India was ready to offer “all possible assistance” to Myanmar and Thailand after the countries were struck by the 7.7-magnitude earthquake, Narendra Modi, the prime minister, said.

“Praying for the safety and wellbeing of everyone,” Modi wrote on X.

“India stands ready to offer all possible assistance. In this regard, asked our authorities to be on standby.”

People were left crouching on the tarmac as staff urgently evacuated Mandalay airport’s buildings.

Footage shared on social media showed passengers running through the heavily damaged airport lounges and huddled on the ground on the runway near the aircraft.

Mandalay airport is one of only three international airports in Myanmar, and is located 22 miles (35km) south of Mandalay, in Tada-U.

Emergency workers help an injured man in Bangkok

ANN WANG/REUTERS

A Scottish tourist in Bangkok described the panic when the earthquake struck the Thai capital.

Fraser Morton was in one of Bangkok’s many malls shopping for camera equipment. “All of a sudden the whole building began to move, immediately there was screaming and a lot of panic,” he told the AP news agency.

“I just started walking calmly at first but then the building started really moving … a lot of screaming, a lot of panic, people running the wrong way down the escalators, lots of banging and crashing inside the mall.”

“I got outside and then looked up at the building, and the whole building was moving, dust and debris, it was pretty intense,” he said. “Lots of chaos.”

At least ten people have died after the earthquake hit Shwe Phone Shein Mosque in Mandalay, local media reports.

“It collapsed while we were worshipping. About three mosques collapsed. There were people trapped, so at least ten people have died now. The death toll could be higher,” a rescue worker told the Yangon Times.

Rescuers work at the site in Bangkok

ANN WANG/REUTERS

More than 40 workers are trapped after a 30-storey skyscraper under construction for government offices collapsed in Bangkok, police and medics said.

There were approximately 50 workers inside the building near Chatuchak Park at the time, according to the broadcaster Thai PBS.

A video circulating on social media appears to show a part-constructed high-rise building owned by Thailand’s Office of the Auditor General completely collapsing.

A state of emergency has been declared in Bangkok, Thailand’s prime minister said.

After hosting an urgent meeting with various cabinet ministers, Paetongtarn Shinawatra said on X that various ministries were being prepared for the disaster’s aftermath, including the health ministry, which will “prepare hospitals and emergency medical units in high-risk areas”.

Paetongtarn added: “We ask that all citizens listen to information directly from government agencies, from government operation centres only, to avoid panic and reduce the dissemination of news that is not true.”

Motorists pick up pieces of a damaged road in Naypyidaw, the capital of Myanmar

STR/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Many of Bangkok’s modern buildings are strongly made, but Myanmar, a poor country ruled by a corrupt military dictatorship, does not have such standards.

The country is racked by a violent civil war between the junta and resistance forces, which will greatly add to the difficulties of any relief effort.

The first indications of damage came from Bangkok, 640 miles away from the epicentre, where people ran onto the streets in panic after the earthquake struck at about 1.20pm local time

Earthquakes are not as common in mainland southeast Asia as in Japan and Indonesia. Myanmar has the active Sagaing Fault running north to south though the centre of the country.

A 6.8-magnitude earthquake in 2016 killed three people in Bagan, the ancient Myanmar capital, and destroyed ancient temple buildings.

There have been no immediate statements from the Myanmar government on the damage caused or casualties.

Images on social media, however, appear to show the Ava Bridge — a 16-span suspension bridge built by the British in 1934 in central Myanmar — having completely collapsed. Damage was also apparent in Mandalay’s international airport.

There have yet to be any immediate reports of casualties from the earthquake. However the Thai prime minister, Paetongtarn Shinawatra, said she had interrupted an official visit to the southern island of Phuket to hold an “urgent meeting”.

Paetongtarn was in Phuket for a meeting at the time of the 7.7-magnitude earthquake.

Tremors were felt in the northern city of Chiang Mai, as well as Bangkok, according to the country’s disaster agency.

Bangkok police say a high-rise building under construction collapsed, with footage on social media showing other tall buildings collapsing in the Thai capital.

Other videos showed rooftop pools in Bangkok with water sloshing over the sides.

The greater Bangkok area is home to more than 17 million people, many of whom live in high-rise apartments.