The morning shift had downed tools for lunch, passing colleagues in blue and red overalls walking towards the 34-storey skyscraper gleaming against a clear blue Bangkok sky.
Though the next crew were not yet all in place, as many as 100 had already made their way to the high-rise as it began to sway back and forth. Then they all started running.
Sprinting past concrete mixers and diggers while still wearing their yellow helmets, the workers raced to outrun falling debris that smashed into the ground as the building collapsed. Some dragged colleagues along, while others fell in the melee. Within a few short seconds, they were all engulfed.
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Even though the Thai capital is more than 600 miles from the epicentre of yesterday’s quake in Myanmar, its impact on the city showed the power of an earthquake on a 21st-century metropolis. It also illustrated the stark contrast between the capacity to respond of two southeast Asian nations that are at opposite ends of the economic scale.
Disaster, however, can be a great leveller. Last night rescue crews were scouring rubble and twisted metal in Thailand and in Myanmar in the hope of finding survivors from an earthquake that authorities said was unprecedented in its savagery.
At the building site in Bangkok, hopes were fading that the dozens of missing would be found alive. Among those being sought with increasing desperation was a group of 20 workers who had been in a lift shaft during the collapse.
Somsak Satkaew, 67, said construction workers had been shouting warnings to colleagues working on the high-rise that was due to house Thailand’s Office of the Auditor General, a three-year project that had cost more than two billion Thai baht (£45 million). “The noise kept intensifying the entire building came crashing down,” Satkaew told the Thai news outlet, Khaosod.
“Debris like cement pieces started falling down, and the shaking got stronger, so I shouted for everyone to run,” Sunan Kenkiat told CNN. “After the boom, I couldn’t see anything. I was just running to find a way out,” he said.
Kitti Kan, a member of the Forensic Police Force said that his team was on standby to identify bodies as and when they are found. “The plan for tonight is searching for the missing people inside,” he said. “We are hoping that they are alive.”
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Heavy machinery, sniffer dogs and drones were being used to aid the rescue, which is expected to continue through the night. Stretchers have been positioned close to the rubble to carry the living away, once they are found.
It will be a race against time to find those trapped inside. “We are not sure how many days or how many hours the searching period will take,” Kan said.
As the quake hit, it brought a surreal sight: waterfalls in the sky. The swimming pools on the roofs of Bangkok’s luxury high-rises began to spill over. “We were out by the pool on the 11th floor at the Rembrandt Hotel,” Kurt Bull, a tourist from Norwich who was spending ten days on holiday in Thailand with his Swedish girlfriend Sigrid, told The Times.
“My girlfriend asked me if the floor was moving when she was lying on the bed,” he said. “And then suddenly I realised it was also moving. And then the building beside the Rembrandt started moving a lot and was really creaking, and you could hear cracking of the structure, and the smaller glass windows were popping out at the side of the building.”
Like tens of thousands across the city, Bull fled the building, standing outside wondering if it would fall. “It was an adrenaline rush, for sure,” he said.
Chris Farmer, from the Philippines, sought sanctuary at ground level. “We were actually outside having lunch at the restaurant,” Farmer said, “[and] the building was just shaking.” He added: “We’re staying in Bangkok but we just don’t want to stay in a high-rise building.”
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Stephen Osbaldeston, from Teesside, had only just landed at Don Mueang airport. He said there were “concrete hailstones the size of cannon balls coming from the upper highway structures”.
Steve Denyer, a presenter on Virgin Radio, had been staying at the Banyan Tree Bangkok and just sat down for a tea in the executive lounge on the 19th floor. “I thought maybe I was fainting, I felt a bit dizzy, I was discombobulated and then everything flew off the table on to the floor,” he said.
“We started to sway, the room was swaying, things were falling off tables. You heard the structure starting to creak and then violently, things were crashing down from floors above and that’s when the screaming started.
“We went down into the emergency stairwell, the whole building was swaying, and I was really worried the roof was going to collapse. I thought, had something slammed into the building? Your senses go into overload when you don’t know.”
The disaster brought ruin to the plans of many Britons, like Kurt Hale, from Edinburgh, who had travelled to Thailand to celebrate his 21st birthday and was on the 33rd floor of the DoubleTree Hilton Sukhumvit. “I was still in bed at the time,” he said. “I woke up, I felt like it was me being dizzy, I felt like it was vertigo.
“There was screaming all around me. I went outside and from that distance I could see the skyscraper collapsing. You could see it completely go into nothing then everything went into a standstill.”
The Thai deputy prime minister, Phumtham Wechayachai, visited the scene of the building collapse in Chatuchak, an area of Bangkok that is popular on the weekends for its market, where thousands of stalls sell everything from Buddha statues to clothing and pets.
Ryan Ruparelia, 23, based in Bangkok but originally from Wembley, northwest London, was out shopping at the time. “Trying to get down the stairs was absolutely mad, there were people jumping over each other,” he said. “I finally got out of the building, I still didn’t know what was going on. I was shocked. My leg was shaking because of all of the adrenaline.”
Though there was panic in Thailand, the relatively orderly response stood in contrast to neighbouring Myanmar, where authorities issued a rare admission that they were overwhelmed.
When the quake struck, Julie, a doctor in Myanmar’s largest city, Yangon, thought of her loved ones. “I was feeling worried about my family who are away from me,” the doctor, who requested to only use her first name, told The Times.
“This is my first time experiencing the biggest earthquake. I felt like I might be dead or injured.” She worried that the country’s healthcare system would not be able to cope. “I don’t think Myanmar’s healthcare system can support and help them very much,” she said.
“They do not have enough medical resources, manpower, emergency preparation and management. If possible, I want international support and help [for] my country.”
The quake hit hardest in Mandalay, the city about which Rudyard Kipling famously wrote, followed by a second aftershock, 11 minutes later. It did not take long for the injured to begin arriving in hospitals by car and on motorbikes.
In Naypyidaw, the capital, a rescue worker was seen attempting to extract a mother and her child from a building. Dr Kyaw Zin, who works at Mandalay General Hospital, told The New York Times that he had been about to start surgery before everyone fled. “More injured people keep arriving, but we do not have enough doctors and nurses,” he admitted. “The cotton swabs have almost run out.”
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Across the country, landmark Buddhist temples collapsed, including the Ma Soe Yane monastery. One video posted online showed robed monks in the street watching as their monastery fell to the ground.
The disaster was likely to have had a crushing impact on Bagan, the Unesco world heritage site in Myanmar known as “temple town”. Images shared on social media showed many of the temples built between the 10th and 13th centuries reduced to rubble.
At the scene of the building collapse in Bangkok, crowds had gathered to seek information about the fate of their loved ones. A police whiteboard listed the numbers of dead and missing. Though only eight were so far known to have died, officials said that number would only grow and grow.
There was a ray of hope, however. The one person rescued so far, officials said, had been in the lift shaft as the building disintegrated.
