More than 1,700 have been killed, 4,000 injured and thousands are still unaccounted for after Taiwan was devastated by its strongest earthquake this century. Several towns in central Taiwan, which were almost annihilated in the earthquake, were still cut off last night.
From the epicentre of the town of Puli, which sustained 98 per cent structural damage from the quake measuring up to 8.1 on the Richter scale, a radius of at least 30 km was still unreachable by rescuers except by helicopter.
As night descended, the few crews flying into the heart of the disaster zone were forced to suspend drops of medicine and food and airlifts of the injured. A cut in all power supply in the hilly area had made flying too dangerous.
The earthquake hit the island at 1:47 a.m. on Tuesday (6.47 p.m on Monday, Irish time) as most of the island's 22 million people slept.
Even without an accurate damage assessment in the worst hit areas, the interior ministry announced last night that at least 2,991 people across the country were still trapped under rubble.
At Nantou, capital of the worst affected province with about 1,000 dead, the number of bodies ferried by helicopter to waiting ambulances from Puli and surrounding areas built a horrific picture.
The corpses swamped hospital morgues and staff began laying the dead by the roadside taped up in blue plastic sheets. Power shortages meant even those in morgues soon began to rot in the 27 Celsius heat.
Frantic survivors tried to peer through the coloured wrapping as they searched for missing family members. At the end of a line of bodies, a family gathered around one corpse and rocked back and forth on their knees, murmuring Taoist prayers over offerings of "ghost money" for the dead to take with them. Taoist monks were also called in to chant Buddhist hymns for the victims.
Forty-one bodies were laid out in a makeshift morgue converted from an administrative building in the small town of Dali, where 80 people died. By midnight, 23 had been claimed by surviving relatives and taken home.
One man told how his elder brother dug for four hours in the rubble of his parents' home only to discover their octogenarian mother dead. The man's 83-year-old father, freshly widowed, could only repeat in a monotone how "lucky" he was to survive. Asked about his wife, he merely stared ahead.
Rescue efforts were suspended with the end of natural light in Puli and surrounding areas as the national death toll climbed past 1,712, but the Interior Ministry said the desperate searches through rubble and ruins elsewhere would continue through the night.
Emergency teams across central regions extracted body after broken body from the ruins of homes.
By nightfall tens of thousands of homeless people had gathered in camps, either unable to stay at home or refusing to remain indoors for fear of aftershocks. Food stores in central Taichung appeared to have been looted.
As emergency workers and troops gingerly examined the wreckage of one residential building, a woman whose husband was trapped inside repeatedly beat her head on the family car, which was parked in what used to be their driveway.
"I do not want to live without him," she screamed. Her neighbours, shell-shocked and absorbed in their own tragedies, made no move to stop her.