When Wang Ming-chuang left for work in a mining area in Hualien County early on Wednesday morning, he did not expect to witness someone being buried alive and find himself trapped there for more than 24 hours.
“Large and small rocks fell from the sky, like a hail of bullets,” the 64-year-old Wang said, recalling his desperation after an earthquake, which measured 7.2 on the Richter scale and magnitude 7.4 on the moment magnitude scale, struck off Hualien County at 7:58am on Wednesday and triggered massive rockslides.
“All I could do was to keep running, and I narrowly managed to escape the falling rocks when I reached the edge of the cliff,” he said after being rescued by the National Airborne Service Corps on Thursday morning.
Photo couresy of the National Airborne Service Corps
It was a sleepless night for Wang, as he saw a worker in the mining area being unable to flee in time and buried beneath the rubble.
He did not dare to try and rescue the buried worker, Wang said, and many younger workers were so frightened that they burst into tears.
Wang said that he and his colleagues were contracted to do a one-day greening project at a site in the Ho Jen mining area in Hualien’s Sioulin Township (秀林), where other contractors were also working on other projects.
Upon realizing that the only road out was blocked by rubble, Wang said he and six other workers decided to pile up stacks of sandbags in a circle for shelter and to call for help.
The ground seemed to never stop shaking and rocks kept falling all the time, Wang said of the intensive aftershocks that occurred throughout his restless night.
Their ordeal eventually came to an end after the National Airborne Service Corps located Wang and the other trapped workers and dispatched Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters to bring them back to safety in batches.
The Hualien County Fire Department said that 17 people trapped in the Ho Jen mining area had been rescued as of Thursday morning.
The body of the one worker killed as a result of the earthquake was also retrieved from the site, the department said.
Wang and the others were not the only ones who barely escaped death in the Hualien mountains.
An employee of five-star hotel Silks Place Taroko, surnamed Chiu (邱), said she and 34 other colleagues were stuck in a half-open tunnel after the three shuttle buses they were on tried to dodge falling rocks shaken free by the earthquake.
The hotel is in Taroko Gorge, a popular tourist destination near the Tianxiang Recreation Area that is served by only one road, Provincial Highway No. 8.
It was blocked by rockslides and landslides in both directions, forcing the three buses to take refuge in the tunnel. Chiu’s was the only one that took a direct hit.
She said that shortly after the quake occurred, she saw rocks falling on the road and before she could react, a rock had hit her bus, smashing the back end of the bus’ roof and causing the front half to buckle upward.
“Everything was pitch black,” Chiu said of that moment, after being rescued on Thursday, adding that she was almost driven to tears until a colleague calmed her down.
The group was unable to get help due to a lack of mobile service, and it was not until they were located by a drone dispatched by the Highway Bureau on Thursday that rescue teams could reach them.
The hotel workers, including one who was seriously injured and two others with minor injuries, were rescued after the rescue teams removed rubble from outside the tunnel with a bulldozer.
That enabled the stranded workers to walk a short distance out of the tunnel down the road to where transportation was waiting to take them out of the gorge.
“At one point, I thought we were all going to die,” Chiu said of being stuck in the tunnel, apparently still frightened. “I will never go up into the mountain again.”
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