Find survivors of Bangkok Building collapsed

Aubonrat Setnawet, an an e -editor of an electrician, was working with her husband on the 23rd floor of a new office tower on the northern edge of Bangkok moments before the disaster hit.

He needed to get some equipment, so he brought the construction elevator to the ground floor. Suddenly, he felt the ground to sway under her and, with two acute sounds, the unfinished building began to collapse.

With his cell phone in his hand, racing to escape debris that fall like a large cloud of dust. He tried to call her husband, nugy setnawet, an electrician, but his calls have not passed.

Since then, he has remained on the site, silently looking while the rescuers seek survivors. The news was gloomy. Eight bodies were recovered from the scene on Friday but only one Saturday.

“I’m still waiting here, waiting for a miracle,” said Mrs. Aubonrat.

About 80 people who considered themselves were in the 30 -storey building at the time of the collapse for which they are not accounted for.

The rescuers who used heavy equipment and canine search teams identified only the only body during Saturday’s search. The pile of rubble – seven floors high – it is so unstable that it took hours to recover the body.

This brought to 10 the number of victims known to Bangkok from the earthquake, including a crane operator who fell to death from a different building under construction.

The epicenter of the earthquake was more than 600 miles north near Mandalay, the second largest city in Myanmar, where the devastation was much worse. More than 1,600 have been reported dead and the number should increase considerably.

On the site of the Bangkok building collapsed, the research continued until the evening under intense lights. The heavy equipment operators have moved large pieces of metal from the rubble in the hope of finding survivors.

Hundreds of rescuers from the military, the police and the groups of volunteers have contributed to the research. Dozens of relatives and friends of the disappeared workers looked at a barrier behind.

In addition to research dogs, the rescue teams used heat sensors to try to detect people who were still alive.

Periodically, all the work stopped so that researchers could listen to the sounds of the survivors. But on Saturday evening, they had not listened to any shouts of help inside the mountain of debris.

Piyalux Thinkaew, a rescuer of the Ruamkaanyu Foundation, said that the heavy equipment that arrived on Saturday were used to free large pieces of metal and concrete while the workers have tried carefully not to destabilize the mountain of debris.

“This is to open a path to be able to see below and control any signs of life,” he said. “It is a very difficult task and it is also a risky job for rescuers.”

SuCratvee Suwansawat, a civil engineering professor at King Mongkut University and former president of the Council of Engineers Thailand, said that experts must determine whether the collapse was caused by a design defect or a construction error.

An unfinished building should no longer be in danger of collapsing during an earthquake of a completed structure, he said.

“It must be 100 %safe,” he said. “There was something wrong. It is as if the building exploded. It’s not normal.”

He said Thailand had never experienced the collapse of a building of this size. Previously, he said, two six -storey buildings collapsed, one in 2014 and one in 1993.

“We haven’t really experience with this,” he said. “We cannot yet say much because we have to look at the calculations and collect samples and tests. Everything collapsed at the same time. And from the video, we saw the columns burst.”

The building was to be an office tower for the Bangkok general auditor.

A Chinese state company, the 10th group of engineering China Railway, was part of a consortium assigned the contract to build the skyscrapers, according to an article in the Daily people, the bocchino of the Chinese Communist Party, which had been published in 2021. The Consortium also included a manufacturer based in Bangkok, the Italian-Thai development PLC.

Neither companies could be immediately reached for a comment.

The project, which broke in April 2021, was one of the highest buildings in China Railway Engineering Group had built, said the Daily People’s Daily at that moment.

The company is a branch of a state giant, China Railway Group, which is strongly involved in the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative belt, a global infrastructure project intended to deepen the networks of the Chinese supply chain and expand the influence of the country.

Among those who were waiting for the word of their disappeared relatives on the site there was Saifon Thongsuk, 36 years old, whose aunt and two adult children were all working on the office tower.

They had worked in a different construction project on the outskirts of Bangkok, but had recently been sent to the site due to an urgent need for workers, he said.

“I don’t know how long they worked here,” he said. “I just know they were working on the top floor.”

Naruemol Thonglek, 44, arrived on the site looking for words of six people including her husband, her son and four collaborators.

Even Mrs. Naruemol had worked on the site until recently, but she stopped because her husband worried that they were leaving her too exhausted.

“I rushed here as soon as I heard of the earthquake,” he said. “I tried to grab it. The messages were not delivered. The calls were not connected. I can’t contact them.”

He continued: “I guess it’s in the middle of that pile of rubble. Maybe there is a little space for the air, I don’t know. I can only hope for miracles.”

Thurian Pheungrod, 47, also hurried to the site on Friday after learning that his brother and his sister -in -law were buried in the collapsed building. They had worked on the site for several months.

“At the beginning, I still believed that there could be a miracle,” he said. “I still had hope. But I no longer hope for miracles.”

Berry Wang AND David Pierson Reports contributed by Hong Kong.