A powerful earthquake has killed more than 140 people in Myanmar on Friday,toppling buildings and wrecking infrastructure across the city including a skyscraper under construction in neighbouring Thailand.
The Earthquake struck Myanmar’s second largest city, Mandalay, which lies close to the epicentre of the 7.7 magnitude followed by a powerful aftershock and several more moderate ones.
General Min Aung Hlaing, leader of Myanmar’s military junta, said there would be more deaths and casualties and invited “any country” to provide help and donations.
Speaking at the White House later on Friday, U.S. President Donald Trump said that he had spoken with officials in Myanmar and that his administration would be providing some form of assistance.
“We’re going to be helping,” he told reporters.
Rescue workers were trying to reach dozens of monks trapped under rubble in the Phaya Taung Monastery, said the emergency worker in Amarapura. Buildings, bridges and roads were wrecked, residents and local media said.
According to State-run MRTV said at least 144 people had been killed in Myanmar and 732 injured.
The junta is locked in a struggle to put down insurgents fighting its rule, a situation that is likely to complicate the rescue and relief operation.
“We all ran out of the house as everything started shaking,” a Mandalay resident told Reuters. “I witnessed a five-storey building collapse in front of my eyes. Everyone in my town is out on the road and no one dares to go back inside.”
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said the United Nations was mobilising in Southeast Asia to help those in need.
Zin Mar Aung, the diplomatic spokesperson for the opposition National Unity Government, said fighters from the anti-junta militias known as the People’s Defence Forces would provide humanitarian help.
State media also said the quake caused the collapse of buildings in five cities and towns, as well as a railway bridge and a road bridge on the Yangon-Mandalay Expressway.
Amnesty International said the earthquake could not have come at a worse time for Myanmar, given the number of displaced people, the existing need for relief aid, and cuts to U.S. aid by the Trump administration.
Since overthrowing the elected civilian government of Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi in 2021, the military has struggled to run Myanmar, leaving the economy and basic services including healthcare in tatters.
An armed opposition, comprising established ethnic armies and new resistance groups formed since the coup, has seized swathes of territory and driven the junta out of border areas, increasingly hemming it into the central lowlands.
The fighting has displaced more than three million people in Myanmar, with widespread food insecurity and over a third of the population in need of humanitarian assistance, the U.N. says.
Myanmar has also been hit by natural disasters in recent years, and the internationally isolated junta has struggled to respond adequately. It lies on the boundary of two tectonic plates and is among the world’s most seismically active countries
