After a shallow 6.4magnitude earthquake struck in the early hours of today in Tainan, a city in Taiwan, rescuers pulled out 221 people and three dead from a collapsed residential high-rise complex. A few others are still locked inside.

The emergency response centre said that, three people were killed - a 10-day-old infant, a 55-year-old woman and a 50-year-old man.

Taiwan's official news agency said, the infant and the man were pulled out of a 17-storey Wei Guan residential building and that both were later declared dead. The agency said 256 people were believed to have been living in 92 households.

Reportedly, several others have been rescued from a market and a seven-floor building  was badly damaged. Even a bank building was also damaged, but fortunately, no injuries were reported.

According to the US Geological Survey, several people were sleeping, when the earthquake struck at about 4 am. It was located some 22 miles (36 kilometres) southeast of Yujing, and struck about 6 miles (10 kilometres) underground.

Reportedly, a mother and a daughter were among the survivors pulled from the Wei Guan building and the girl drank her urine, while waiting for rescue, which came sooner than expected.

The earthquake was felt as a lengthy, rolling shake in the capital, Taipei, on the other side of the island. But Taipei was quiet, with no sense of emergency or obvious damage just before dawn.
Even tremors were felt in mainland China, the residents reported.

It is not new for Taiwan to face the earthquakes very often. But most of them are minor and cause little damage.  

However, in 1999, a magnitude-7.6 earthquake in central Taiwan, killed more than 2,400 people.

By Phani Ch