Hundreds still stranded days after biggest earthquake to hit Taiwan in decades

Rescuers in Taiwan plan to use heavy machinery on Saturday to locate bodies left behind by Wednesday’s earthquake.

Emergency crews are working to recover two bodies buried under boulders on a hiking trail, three days on from Taiwan’s biggest tremor in 25 years.

Four more people remain missing on the same Shakadang Trail in Taroko National Park, famed for its rugged mountainous terrain.

Search and recovery work was set to resume after being called off on Friday afternoon due to aftershocks.

At least 12 people were killed by the magnitude 7.4 earthquake that struck on Wednesday morning off Taiwan’s east coast, and 10 others were still missing.

The two dead and four missing on Shakadang Trail include a family of five.

The trapped bodies found on Friday were a man and a woman, but they have not been identified, according to Taiwanese media reports.

More than 600 people, including about 450 at a hotel in the Taroko national park, remain stranded in various locations cut off by rockslides and other damage.

Survivors have said there were rocks tumbling onto roadways, trapping them in tunnels until rescuers arrived to free them. In the city of Hualien, a building left tilting over a street at a precarious angle was being carefully torn down.

The relatively low number of deaths from such a powerful quake has been attributed to strict construction standards and widespread public education campaigns on the earthquake-prone island.

Wednesday is the largest seismic shift in decades, with the last major quake hitting the nation in 1999 with the 7.7 magnitude earthquake killing 2,400 people.