오늘의 BBC 뉴스 스크립트: 2025년 3월 29일 (2)

오늘의 BBC 뉴스 요약: 2025년 3월 29일 (2)

 

 

A very good evening to you. At least 144 people are now known to have died and more than 700 are injured after a powerful earthquake struck Central Myanmar, with strong tremors extending into neighboring Thailand and Southwest China, but the number of dead is expected to rise significantly. The 7.7 magnitude quake struck a little after 1 p.m.

local time, with the epicenter near Myanmar's second largest city of Mandalay. Then, just a few minutes later, another less powerful tremor hit. A state of emergency has now been declared across large parts of the country.

The shock waves were, however, felt. Hundreds of miles away in Bangkok, where more than 80 construction workers are missing after an unfinished high-rise building collapsed, Myanmar is under the control of a military regime, which has restricted access to websites and social media. That means, along with power lines being brought down, it's difficult to get information out of the country.

We'll have the latest from there in a moment, but first to Nick Marsh, who's live in Bangkok. Nick, yeah Clive, I mean you can see the sheer scale of the devastation here. It's getting pretty late in Bangkok now, but rescue workers have been here for hours.

Battling through that debris, just desperately looking for any sign of survivors, the latest figures that we've been given are six fatalities, but more than a 100 people still missing there, and for those people, just a few hours ago, it was a normal Friday afternoon at work, that was until, of course, that earthquake struck 800 miles away. [Applause] After the shock, it took just moments for tragedy to hit Thailand. This was years of work destroyed in seconds.

More than 400 people were at this construction site when it suddenly collapsed, the panic as workers ran for their lives, people nearby fled the scene. Matthew Martin, who was working in a nearby building, saw the moment that the tower block collapsed. First, our building started shaking, and looking outside, I started taking a video after maybe 30 seconds and could see the street light swaying on the road.

 

Everybody stopped on the expressway, then by the time I panned back, you could see this building had collapsed, and you could see the dust and the debris rising up in the air, so pretty surreal. Dozens may be trapped in the debris, just how many have lost their lives is still unclear. The force was so strong that patients in a nearby hospital had to be evacuated.

Doctors and nurses tried to treat them in a safe zone outside, where one woman gave birth. 800 miles from the epicenter, people abandoned their offices for the safety of the street. At first, I thought my head was spinning, so I moved to see what was happening, and things started swaying even more, so I quickly ran to my kids.

I told my kids we can't stay here, we have to get out of here, so we ran down to get outside. Others who stayed inside couldn't believe what they saw, water spilling from infinity pools high above. I was in the office, and people started running, running out, and I thought for a split second, I was like, isn't It's better to stay inside, isn't it safer, so that's what I did, and then I saw the other building and started filming, and it was basically the pool overflowing and like a wonderful tonight.

The Thai Prime Minister visited the site of the collapsed building. It was supposed to be a new government departmental headquarters. Today, it became a disaster zone.

Rescue workers have a long night ahead of them, battling through the debris here, just trying to find anyone who might be alive. Their priority is to try and find as many survivors as possible, but for the people who saw this building collapse and for the people. Who, who are here now, the feeling's a mixture of shock at what happened and dread at what they might find.

For the Thai people, it's a chilling hint of what their neighbors in Myanmar must have felt, what they must be going through right now. Nick Marsh, BBC News, Bangkok. Well, the epicenter of the earthquake was in central Myanmar, and the number of dead is expected to rise.

 

As we mentioned, information is very tightly restricted by the ruling military regime, and international journalists are rarely granted access to report from the country. Caroline Hy, working with the BBC's Burma service and BBC Verify, takes a Look now at the impact of the disaster in Myanmar, and a warning, there are some distressing images in her report. Buddhist monks cower, caught between collapsing buildings on the tarmac at Mandalay International Airport.

You can see a plane sway from the force of the earthquake. Terrified passengers don't know what to do before they're directed to move further away from the building. In Myanmar's second largest city, there's panic on the streets.

Mandalay, 10 miles from the epicenter, is home to 1 and a half million people. Buildings dangerously disfigured and fallen in on themselves after the Earth. Moved beneath them.

[Music] This woman's trapped with her baby boy, her legs are caught under rubble on the ground floor of a damaged building in the capital, Naypyidaw. A painstaking effort to get her free. We don't yet know the real scale of this disaster, but hospitals have been inundated with the injured, brought in not by ambulance, but in whatever transport they can find, treated on the street in the heat because of fear of aftershocks.

So many wounded, the authorities have appealed to the public to donate blood. "While I was doing the housework, I felt shaking, it was very strong, I was afraid that the building..." Would collapse, and as I went outside, I was hit by a cabinet that fell on me. A high-level visit to the hospital by the internationally isolated military.

Hunter, the needs are so great that it's made a rare appeal for outside help. We want the international community to give humanitarian aid as soon as possible. The spokesman says the damage has been indiscriminate.

 

They watch in horror as a pagoda in Mandalay comes down. Cultural jewels, along with basic infrastructure, have been destroyed, and many areas have been cut off with roads concertinaed and cracked, and the power and internet down. That's just in territory controlled by the military government.

Information from rebel-held areas, already reeling from recent fighting, is harder to come by. The earthquake was felt hundreds of miles away in Southwest China, a glimpse of its ferocity and the fear that accompanied it. The aid effort in Myanmar will be complicated, regardless of religion or politics.

The hope is that the help now being mobilized by the UN will be allowed to reach everyone. Tonight, a rescue worker in Mandalay told the BBC that many people remain under the rubble, and with little equipment, they're digging for survivors with Bare hands, Caroline Hawley, BBC News. So how do these earthquakes happen, and why was this one so big and devastating? Pallab Ghosh is here to explain more.

Pallab, these images show the damage caused by the earthquake. The region is one of the most seismically active regions in the world, but this latest shock was one of the most powerful in the area for a century. So this is a very large earthquake.

It's capable of causing extreme damage close to the epicenter, and it's likely to have been felt further away. The Earth's crust is made up of plates which rub up against each other. They can slip and suddenly release their energy, which is What happened on this fault line outside the city of Mandalay in Myanmar this morning? The power of an earthquake is measured by the moment magnitude scale, which goes from 1 to 10, with each whole number being 10 times more powerful than the previous.

So, at 7.7, this was a really intense shock. It was followed by a smaller aftershock of 6.4, and then several others. There are likely to be more in the coming days and weeks, but they'll be smaller and less frequent.

 

The concern, though, is that the earthquake and the aftershocks were relatively shallow, less than 6 miles deep, which means that the impact on the populated. Area above was much greater, it's very shallow. The depth is being quoted as 10 kilometers, it could be less.

The shallower an earthquake, the stronger the shaking that's felt at the surface, and it's the strength of the shaking that does the damage, not the magnitude of the earthquake. If it's distant or deep, it doesn't do much harm at the surface, so it has caused some quite strong shaking. The question is whether we can predict when and where these earthquakes will happen to give an early warning.

The answer, unfortunately, is no, although we know where these plates are rubbing up against each other, we can't tell. In advance exactly when they'll release their energy. Clive, okay, Palab, thank you, Palab Ghosh, there, our signs correspondent.

Uh, let's return to Nick Marsh, who's live in Bangkok. Nick, truly awful scenes that we've seen from the region. The fact is, the number of dead is likely to rise significantly.

Yeah, it is, Clive. I mean, as I say, these rescue workers have been here for hours and hours and hours. There are rows and rows of emergency vehicles, of diggers, of pickup trucks, heavy machinery, and still we haven't, apart from the immediate aftermath of the maps, we haven't seen any survivors come out, so people are Bracing for the worst, there are a 100 people unaccounted for.

Like I say, in terms of who these workers are, we understand it's a mixture of Thai and Burmese workers, and these Burmese workers, of course, will have families in Myanmar, not only having to deal with what's happening back home in their country, but also worried about now what's happened here in Thailand. Nick, thank you for that. Nick Marer, live in Bangkok.