February 6, 2016 - 10:33 AMT
Powerful quake hits Taiwan, kills at least five

A powerful earthquake toppled a 17-story apartment building in southern Taiwan on Saturday, February 6, killing at least five people, including a 10-day-old girl, and triggering frantic efforts to rescue about 35 people feared trapped inside, Reuters reports.

The baby and three of the other dead were from an apartment complex where the floors of a tower block pancaked down onto to each other when the 6.4 magnitude tremor hit at around 4 a.m. (3.00 p.m. ET), at the start of a Lunar New Year holiday.

Rescuers mounted hydraulic ladders and a crane to scour the wreckage, plucking 221 survivors to safety so far, with dozens taken to hospital, a fire brigade official said.

Elsewhere in the city of 2 million people, several buildings tilted at alarming angles but a fire department official said rescue efforts were now focused entirely on the apartment block, where a child's clothes fluttered from a first-floor laundry line and the smell of leaking gas hung in the air.

The quake was centered 43 km southeast of Tainan, at a depth of 23 km (14 miles), the U.S. Geological Survey said. Several aftershocks shook Tainan, Taiwan's weather bureau said.

Authorities said there were 92 households and 256 people living in the collapsed apartment building, but they did not know how many were actually there when the quake struck.

The fire department said 115 people had been taken to hospital from around Tainan.