Shownotes Transcript
On Friday, a powerful 7.7 magnitude earthquake struck Myanmar, leaving devastation in its wake. At the time of recording, authorities there say that more than 2,000 people have died, but it could be significantly higher. International organisations say even 10,000 have died.
The quake's epicentre was near Myanmar's second-largest city, Mandalay. Twelve minutes later, a second earthquake hit, and there have been ongoing aftershocks since. We never had that kind of earthquake before. It was very strong. It's changed now.
It's shaking again. It's still shaking. Myanmar has declared a state of emergency. But rescue efforts there have been severely hindered, not just by the scale of the disaster, but also by the country's political turmoil. We have very limited resources here because of the current political situation. We do not have enough resources.
doctors and nurses. Since a military coup in 2021, Myanmar has been in the grip of a brutal civil war, making it even harder to get aid to those who need it. Even since the earthquake on Friday, the military regime has continued to drop bombs on parts of the country. So today, you're going to hear about rescue efforts in Myanmar, why it's so hard to find out what's going on there, and why earthquakes are so difficult to predict.
I'm Hannah Gelbart and this is What In The World from the BBC World Service.
First of all, let's hear from some people in Myanmar. Aunt Tehda Piu is an 18-year-old English teacher who is in Mandalay. She described the moment the quake hit. I was in the first floor as well. I thought, oh my God, I'm going to die. We didn't get electricity since the very first quake. We don't get water enough to use to clean ourselves. We have food, but I guess it's going to run out within a few days.
And here's Ong Chitkin. He runs a school in Myanmar and was in Mandalay when the earthquake struck. Initially, I thought it was like a bomb attack.
When we got back to the city, we saw a lot of buildings just crumbled. Rescue teams are trying to get people out of the buildings, but we still just don't have enough people. It's just heartbreaking to see people just screaming from the buildings, the rubbles, but then cannot get them out of them. ♪
To get some more context on Myanmar, here in the studio with me is So Win Thanh, the editor of the BBC's Burmese service. Hello and thank you for coming back on the podcast. Thanks, Anna. What are the rescue efforts that are still ongoing and how successful have they been? Myanmar has been going through this civil war. So the country, even the workforce is quite stretched. Myanmar military government, for them, the rescue or disaster preparedness is never a priority.
So when this scale of earthquake hit, so no one was prepared for two, three days. First two, three days, the locals came
were left to fend for themselves, like many buildings collapsed. And then we could see that we could talk to the people on the ground, that there was no help coming. So they had to remove or clear their debris and rubble by their own hands. It's quite a tragic scene. Even before the earthquake, there's a humanitarian disaster. And then hospital were not very adequately equipped to handle such devastation. And no kind of machinery to help.
There is also a high death toll. The official figures from the government say that more than 2,000 people have died, but it could be much, much higher. Why is it so difficult to get an accurate number on this? So number one is that there are still areas that people can't access to. The internet is down, phone lines are down, so it's very difficult to get the exact information what is happening in several areas.
Also infrastructure-wise, like, you know, that it's difficult to travel because roads, I mean, main highway was...
and many places were not possible. So authorities were trying to patch those. Who controls the flow of information in and out of Myanmar? Mainly the military. They had shut down or banned social media, the most popular social media in Myanmar. Facebook had been banned. People had to use VPN, that virtual private network, to access to many social pages.
And also, they're not allowing, even yesterday, that military spokesperson came out and said that they are not allowing issuing visas to foreign journalists because the reason they cited was that, oh, we are so busy. We couldn't handle or we couldn't kind of process your applications. But it's a convenient way to stop the information. But we do have, BBC Burmese have a team in the country. So they are filing reports, doing whatever they can at the best of their ability to
Getting information is extremely difficult, even in the best of time before the quake. There were limitations and restrictions, much harder now. You mentioned how the military is in control of the government. Can you explain the political situation there? Myanmar has been going through this civil war since 2021, where the military staged a coup, toppled the government.
the civilian government at the time they seized the power but then they are facing resistance across the country like myanmar has always been at war with ethnic armed groups along the border but what happened after the military coup is that even the young people living in the cities
They went off to join with those ethnic armed groups. They brought back arms and they started to fight from their locality. So the latest research, independent research, mentioned that the military government effectively controlled only a quarter of the country's territory. So several areas are under the control of those resistance groups or armed ethnic groups. So that also complicates this relationship.
rescue effort like you know even traveling through those areas but the opposition exile government announced like two days ago that they would suspend the offensive
Because the military government have still been reportedly dropping bombs since this earthquake struck. Yeah, they continue their aerial raid against some of the ethnic groups. But those are a bit fewer than the normal times. But probably they were also occupied with other things. But still they continue this aerial attacks against the opposition groups.
You described the humanitarian crisis, the situation that Myanmar has been facing for the past few years. How much more aid is going to be needed now after this earthquake? Massive scale, like in the UN, the UN agency in the countries, they had limitation in assessing even before this quake because military put some restrictions on
on, you know, carrying or taking aid to the affected area. But like I said, majority of the areas are in control of those opposition groups. Then military would restrict aid reaching to those areas. But with this quake that compounded everything, like, you know, the hundreds of thousands of people are needing immediate emergency aid now, life-saving aid now. So, but then international community is also willing to go in and help. But
But mind that Myanmar has been under sanctions by a lot of Western countries too. That all complicates things like in Myanmar. Military government also is, you know, historically very reluctant to receive or welcome aid. This time they came out and requested aid. But probably the delivery would be by their own arrangement, which the international governments are also quite a bit reluctant to hand everything over to the military. And lots of different factors complicating the response and rescue efforts here. So thank you so much for coming into the studio. Thank you, Hannah. Thank you.
Away from Myanmar, the earthquake was felt across the region and you might have seen dramatic videos from Bangkok in Thailand showing swaying skyscrapers, water spilling from rooftop pools and a high-rise building under construction that came crashing down in a cloud of white dust. And there are several factors that made the tremors from this earthquake even more intense.
It was shallow, just 10 kilometres below the surface, which made the ground shake more. And the fault line in the area is also quite straight. So that helped carry the quake's energy towards Thailand. And then there's the fact that Bangkok is built on soft soil, which amplified the shaking even further. ♪
To find out more about the science behind earthquakes, I'm speaking to Stephen Hicks, a seismologist and expert in earthquakes at the University College London. Hello and welcome to the podcast. Hiya. First of all, why do earthquakes happen? Yeah, so earthquakes happen, or certainly the largest earthquakes around the world happen on what we call plate boundaries. So the Earth's crust, its sort of uppermost layer, is divided into these layers.
giant plates sort of spanning continents, but those plates interact with each other. They collide with each other. They slide alongside each other. And so that motion, which is only about the rate at which our fingernails grow, is very slow. But then those plates can sometimes become stuck against each other or locked.
And so that sort of accumulated tectonic motion over sort of centuries can suddenly get released in an earthquake that lasts just, you know, seconds to a minute long. So it's really due to that slow tectonic collision processes, which leads to the world's largest earthquakes. Is it like a kind of build up in pressure and then things just...
go over, spill over. Yeah, so some plate boundaries or some geological faults, they will, when these plates move against each other, they will kind of slide constantly. We call that creep. That sort of process doesn't result in large earthquakes, but in other areas, the plates are very much stuck together. And so, yes, it's this sort of accumulated stress effect
which is then suddenly released that we just can't unfortunately predict exactly when or where it will happen. And why is it so hard for us to predict when or where an earthquake might happen? So it's really difficult because the Earth is so complex geologically in terms of how the stress is built up and where it's released.
the friction along the fault, you know, how much they're stuck together really changes over different sort of space and time scales. What we can do, so we can't predict exactly where and when earthquakes will happen, but we can forecast earthquakes. So we can say, based on sort of our scientific data and models, we can say in this particular region, let's say, you know, for example, along the San Andreas Fault in California, we can say that there's a
something like a 40% probability of a magnitude seven in the next, you know, 30 years. So we can sort of give those very broad, uh,
which help people to prepare, but also for any new buildings and old buildings to be sort of developed in such a way that they could withstand those sort of worst case scenarios. So is the difference between a forecast and a prediction that a forecast is pretty vague? It's like a kind of vague probability, whereas a prediction would be a bit more accurate. I mean, I guess we say we forecast the weather, don't we? Exactly. Yeah, it's a weather forecast. And that comes purely down to sort of probabilities. You know, those forecast maps will say weather,
or they're based on models that say in this given region, it will be 70% chance of rain today. And that is exactly like earthquakes. No one ever says predicting the weather. This is sort of a more scientific way of talking about these sort of hazardous events. And if you can't predict when an earthquake or where an earthquake is going to happen, what do we know about them before it starts?
So we do know that in certain areas there is like a higher probability of an earthquake happening. We can roughly say how large that earthquake will be and how strong the ground shaking will be. We're quite good at that. So for example, in the Myanmar earthquake, the magnitude 7.7 earthquake, this fault was locked and stuck together and we knew how long that section of fault was that was stuck. And it hadn't moved in an earthquake since 1835, so nearly 200 years ago.
we knew that there would be an earthquake of this size in that particular region. Obviously, so the key then is preparation and preparing people, facilities, infrastructure for that earthquake when it happens.
The problem becomes in somewhere like Myanmar, where it's a poorly developed country. There's been civil war in recent years. So sort of making sure that earthquake preparation is at the top of the priority, that is probably not going to be the case, sadly, in places like Myanmar. You might have seen on social media, there are quite a few people who claim that they can predict earthquakes. You've just explained how the science makes that impossible. Why is it that these people think that they are able to do that?
Sometimes people for an individual earthquake, by chance, someone might actually say, you know, I predicted an earthquake here and here and I was right. And they, you know, they say, you know, I'm an earthquake predictor. I can predict all the earthquakes. When you look at it over many earthquakes, you know,
For a prediction to be useful, it needs to work for lots of earthquakes. You can't just predict one by chance and say, oh, it was right, but then be wrong for the other 99%. When it comes down to it, these predictions never work for many areas or for many large earthquakes.
And I think the problem with those sorts of false predictions is that it means people don't really prepare. They wait for these predictors to say when the earthquake is going to happen, but actually they're going to be wrong. And then the main emphasis should be on that sort of long-term preparation. It really takes that emphasis away, sadly, having these sort of false predictions. Stephen, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you.
For more updates on this story, please do take a look at the BBC News website. And if you want to find out about the history and politics of Myanmar in more detail, I have spoken to Sowin Thanh before. We did an episode called What's Behind the Civil War in Myanmar, and it talks about how it's affected young people living there. We've also done another episode together. It's on how Myanmar is one of the world's biggest producers of opium. And you can find those wherever you're listening to this podcast.
Thank you so much for joining us. You've been listening to What in the World from the BBC World Service. I'm Hannah Gelbart and I'll see you next time.