Death toll from Myanmar’s devastating earthquake has surpassed 3,000, with hundreds more missing.
This is as forecasts of unseasonal rain presented a new challenge for rescue and aid workers trying to reach people in a country riven by civil war.
Media Talk Africa reports that the last Friday’s 7.7-magnitude quake, one of the Southeast Asian nation’s strongest in a century, jolted a region home to 28 million, toppling buildings, flattening communities and leaving many without food, water and shelter.
Myanmar’s embassy in Japan said on Facebook that on Wednesday, deaths rose to 3,003 with 4,515 injured and 351 missing, while rescuers scramble to find more.
However, conditions could get even tougher for the huge relief effort after weather officials warned unseasonal rain from Sunday to April 11 could threaten the areas hardest-hit by the quake, such as Mandalay, Sagaing and the capital Naypyidaw.
“Rain is incoming and there are still so many buried. And in Mandalay, especially, if it starts to rain, people who are buried will drown even if they’ve survived until this point,” an aid worker in Myanmar said.
The embassy in Japan added in its post that there have been 53 airlifts of aid to Myanmar, while more than 1,900 rescue workers arrived from 15 countries, including Southeast Asian neighbours and China, India and Russia.
According to state television, despite the devastation, junta chief Min Aung Hlaing will leave his disaster-stricken country on Thursday for a rare trip to a regional summit in Bangkok.
The visit is said to be an uncommon foreign visit for a general regarded as a pariah by many countries and the subject of Western sanctions and an International Criminal Court investigation.
