Myanmar earthquake latest: entire communities flattened, aid teams say

Speaking to journalists from Yangon on Tuesday, Julia Rees, Deputy Representative of the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in the country described seeing massive needs rising by the hour, after a 7.7 magnitude quake.

“Entire communities have been flattened,” she said, with children and families sleeping out in the open with no homes to return to.

“I met children who were in shock after witnessing their homes collapsed or the death of a family member… some have been separated from their parents and others are unaccounted for,” she explained.

Some 72 hours after the quake rocked Mandalay and Sagaing regions as well as Nay Pyi Taw and southern Shan state, the death toll has risen to around 2,000, according to the country’s military junta, with hundreds unaccounted for and thousands injured.

“The window for lifesaving response is closing,” Ms. Rees said, while across the affected areas, families face acute shortages of clean water, food and medical supplies. But conditions remain extremely challenging as aid teams are working “without electricity or sanitation, sleeping outside, like the communities we serve”.

International response

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said that local search and rescue teams, supported by international rescue units from a number of countries including China, India, Russia, Thailand and Bangladesh, have been “intensifying their efforts” particularly in central Myanmar, which has continued to experience aftershocks.

The UN’s top humanitarian official on the ground, Marcoluigi Corsi, freshly back from a visit to the country’s capital Nay Pyi Taw said that as the critical window for finding survivors under the rubble was narrowing, conditions in the affected areas continued to deteriorate.

“You have no electricity, you have no running water,” he said, while people were battling the summer heat. “Often there are aftershocks and people are scared to go inside their homes,” he added.

Hospitals overwhelmed

Dr. Fernando Thushara, the representative of the World Health Organization (WHO) in Myanmar, said that in Nay Pyi Taw, he saw hospitals “overwhelmed with patients”.

“The medical supplies were running dry. There were electricity disruptions in some hospitals… and shortages of running water,” he said, adding that in some cases power generators were not working and hospitals were short on fuel.

Dr. Thushara warned that a lack of fresh water and sanitation could fuel outbreaks of infectious diseases “unless we control them very quickly”.

He recalled that a few months back, several townships in Mandalay had been affected by cholera. About 800 cases of the water-borne disease had been reported until February across nine states and regions in Myanmar, while other infectious diseases such as dengue, hepatitis, malaria may spread further.

The dire health situation is not the only crisis confronting the people of  Myanmar. UN refugee agency (UNHCR) spokesperson Babar Baloch stressed that the country is “reeling” from four years of conflict sparked by a military coup in 2021, while the UN’s Mr. Corsi said that in the past few years it has suffered a cyclone and massive flooding.

Mr. Baloch spoke of a “double tragedy” for the people of Myanmar, highlighting the fact that even before the devastating earthquake hit, all the affected areas already hosted 1.6 million displaced people.

Mr. Corsi stressed that the disaster-affected communities’ resilience is now highly compromised. Close to 20 million people across the country were already in need of humanitarian assistance before the earthquake hit and over 15 million were going hungry. Over three months into the year, the UN’s $1.1 billion humanitarian appeal for Myanmar remains only five per cent funded. “This is time…for the world to step up and support the people of Myanmar,” he concluded.