This content was originally published by Radio Free Asia and is reprinted with permission.
Digging with their bare hands, firefighters in Myanmar have pulled some trapped people to health in the weeks following a , devastating 7.7-magnitude disaster, video circulating on social media show.
In one, a mobile phone videos taken by two young girls, ages 13 and 16, shows them trapped with their 75-year-old mother in the tight shadow of a fell flat creating in Mandalay, a city near the epicenter of Friday’s quake.
” We’re trapped in here! We’re trapped in these”! one of them calls out urgently. One lady taps with something silver on a concrete slab to indicate to volunteers where they are.
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Just the light of a cellular telephone illuminates the stuffy scene. Quickly, we get a picture of the mother’s bruised face.
Their mobile phone alerts reached people, who worked feverishly to drill them out. Individual video footage shows a swarm of gentlemen lifting chunks of plaster with their bare fingers. ” We’re set to discover them”! one shouts.
The last seconds of the film shows the three being carried out of the dust on stretchers on Sunday— a happy end amid the darkness of the worst disaster to strike Myanmar in decades.
The military-run state is ill-equipped to listen to the crisis. It is mired in a four-year civil conflict that has already displaced 3 million people.
Thus far, the collapse has killed more than 3, 000 people in Myanmar, according to the military dictatorship that took power in a 2021 revolution.
In another picture, a 13-year-old woman named Pan Aye Chon is unearthed from the wreckage of a crashed convent in Mandalay after three days of cutting by rescue personnel.
While she survived the collapse, family members say she’s heartbroken that many of her companions who were with her died.
When the rattling started midday Friday, the child ran out of the convent but then turned about to go back to try to rescue her companions. Then part of the structure fell and trapped her, community people said.
In the capital, Naypyidaw, a 63-year-old girl was rescued from the wreckage after being trapped for 91 days, or roughly four times, Reuters reported.
Video showed peach uniform-clad firefighters in white hats searching the partially collapsed remnants of a tower before the girl was carried out on a bed.
Reuters was able to verify the location of the picture as Naypyitaw from the buildings, the street layout and the entry to the hospital, which matched satellite imagery of the area.
The date when the video was recorded could not be verified independently, Reuters said. However, a Myanmar Fire Services Department statement said the rescue took place on the morning of April 1.
