Worst quake in a decade brings no major damage

A girl at senior high school in the central Taiwan county of Taichung sustained from minor head injury after a piece of a ceiling hit her; it was the only injury reported as of 8 p.m. yesterday.

A falling roof also sent a man in Nantou rushing out of his home, the TV news channel TVBS reported. The man decided to stay the night in his car, fearing a powerful aftershock. Footage from a surveillance camera in a mall in Nantou obtained by the channel showed a man holding onto a pillar during the 40-second quake. Customers at the counter ran for their lives regardless of whether they had paid or not.

The tremor also hampered telecommunications in Nantou. Almost no phone calls could be made in or out of the county in the initial hours after the jolt, not due to damage but because the system was overloaded with too many trying to call out. Cellphone services were lost in Mingchien village, but land lines were unaffected.

Hundreds of households in Nantou and Changhua counties suffered electricity outages, and one house in a Changhua township suffered minor damage when a wall collapsed, according to the National Fire Agency.

Land traffic remained largely unaffected. Railway networks worked normally while Kaohsiung Mass Rapid Transit system was stopped for a two-minute period.

　　However, a brief halt of High Speed Railway services in parts of central areas caused a stir among affected passengers. Droves of passengers, including lawmakers from the ruling Kuomintang and the opposition Democratic Progress Party, were struck at Wurih Station in Taichung as the bullet train operator decided to delay or cancel some trains as a safety precaution. Some protested, some got on the remaining train, and some had to travel by other means.

Although the quake was related seismically to the 921 temblor, the amount of energy it released was only 1/100 of that produced by the 1999 earthquake, which released energy “equivalent to that of 50 atomic bombs,” the CWB said. The latest quake was a natural release of energy after the 921 incident, the weather authority explained.

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