By Randall Yip, Executive Editor
Wasamon Audjarint, a graduate student at Columbia University studying political journalism pulled an all-nighter Thursday night trying to finish up her thesis.
She says she fell asleep in the library in New York City and woke up to frantic messages from friends asking if her family in Bangkok was alright. As she slept, a massive 7.7 quake that stretched from Miramar to Thailand rocked the area, killing at least four people in Thailand, according to the Thai Examiner and more than 1600 in Miramar, reported the BBC.
“So I was very shocked. So the first thing I did is that I reached out to my mom, my family members and my close friends to check in. How were they doing?Thank God they were all safe,” Audjarint told AsAmNews.
She said at least a couple of buildings under construction had collapsed. Exact casualty numbers are hard to find but understands dozens of people may be missing.
“Thai people, we are really not used to experiencing the earthquake at all. And what my friend experienced is that they saw quite intense shaking of the building and crack on the walls. They were really frightened and they just you know had to walk down from, I don’t know, like 10 or 16 floors to the ground. But besides that, they didn’t actually know what to do because this was so new to them.”
Audjarint says people in Thailand have experienced the 2004 devastating tsunami and major flooding in 2012, but earthquakes are quite rare.
“This thing is really unprecedented,” she said.
AsAmNews is published by the non-profit, Asian American Media Inc.
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