After Bangkok Building Collapse, Fearing High-Rises

When the earth started rocking beneath her home in Bangkok on Friday, Kanittha Thepasak thought she was simply dizzy. Then she heard an odd creaking sound, saw a lamp moving and threw aside a curtain to find cars swaying like boats at sea.

The streets were filled with people who had rushed outside, staring up at the apartment buildings, glass office towers and unfinished construction all around them. Now Ms. Kanittha can barely imagine returning to the office where she spends most of her days. It’s on the 29th floor.

“I’m freaked out, I’m worried,” she said. “Thai people have no basic understanding of earthquakes because we never really experience them.”

The quake that devastated Myanmar on Friday did far less damage in neighboring Thailand, but the sheer force of it — with a magnitude of 7.7 — emptied Bangkok, a city of towers, into the streets. On Sunday, two days later, as the Thai government and engineers inspected hundreds of damaged structures to ensure they could be occupied, it was still darkening thoughts of routines that increasingly include living and working dozens of stories above ground.

The disaster’s most devastating scene in Thailand came from the complete collapse of a Bangkok building that had been under construction. At least 11 workers were reported dead as of Sunday, and with about 75 still unaccounted for, rescue crews continued to pull carefully at the rubble with a dozen excavators and eight dogs trained to find the dead and the living.

Andy Redmond, a member of the K9 team, said all the signals on Sunday pointed to cadavers, with a scent so overwhelming that the dogs struggled to locate individual remains.

“It’s a learning curve,” he said, resting between search missions that had kept him at the site since Friday afternoon. “You can’t train for this.”

Video of the building’s dramatic fall seems etched in the minds of many, altering how residents see their city. For about a decade, Bangkok has been on the move, upward and outward, with a construction boom fueled by the expansion of its subway and Skytrain.

But now, with at least a dozen cranes hovering over the skyline, gray skeletons of steel and concrete that once signaled economic growth have taken on an ominous quality.

Somreutal Nilbanjong, 34, found herself gazing at one such building downtown on Sunday afternoon as she walked home. Asked what she was thinking, she said, “It scares me just to look at it.”

A small construction elevator climbed up the exterior through pink scaffolding. She scrolled through her phone until she found a photo of the mountain of rubble a few miles away — the collapsed building, Bangkok’s ground zero.

Goose bumps appeared on her arms, and she shuddered.

“I’m afraid it’s going to happen again,” she said.

Government officials have tried to calm people’s nerves and keep people updated.

Immediately after Friday’s quake, Thailand’s prime minister, Paetongtarn Shinawatra, issued an urgent alert warning people to be wary of aftershocks for the next 24 hours.

By that evening, she sought to reassure the public by announcing that the situation had stabilized and that residents could return to their homes.

On Saturday, she rode on Bangkok’s elevated railway, known as the Skytrain, to show that the trains were safe. The system had been shut down after the quake and inspected before most of the lines were reopened.

But even as the city has re-emerged toward normalcy — malls and markets full, trains rumbling over streets packed with motorbikes — many people are struggling to process something they had thought happened only in other places, like Japan or Taiwan.

Ms. Kanittha said the experience was so confounding that her mind raced to memories of what she had seen in Japanese comics or manga, with animated disasters.

Many people said they weren’t necessarily scared, but that they were forced to ask unexpected questions: Behind glass facades, are buildings really secure? What if there are cracks that cannot be seen? What if there’s a giant aftershock?

Jiraporn Jaichob, 41, a drink stall owner who was having lunch when the temblor struck, said she was making plans for future disasters.

She was thinking of buying a transistor radio since she’d seen cellphone coverage go down. She also created a go bag for family with key documents and supplies.

“With this earthquake we learned that we don’t know what might happen in a given day,” she said.

“We can die anytime, anywhere, I know, it’s our fate,” she added. “But at least we take care of our lives where we can.”

Thailand upgraded its earthquake-resistant building code in 2007, and experts said the vast majority of the city’s buildings were clearly strong enough to withstand what should still be considered a rare seismic event. Still, some engineers called for greater scrutiny and a potential upgrade in standards and enforcement.

“Look at Japan — they keep developing their laws and design,” said Suchatvee Suwansawat, a professor of civil engineering at King Mongkut University and a former president of the Council of Engineers Thailand. “We should do that as well.”

The collapse of the 30-story building, which had been going up beside a mall and popular weekend market, could be a turning point. It never should have buckled, said Dr. Suchatvee, suggesting that something went wrong in design, execution or oversight.

Four years into construction, it was being built by a Chinese state-owned company, the China Railway 10th Engineering Group. The Thai government has promised to investigate and report early findings in a week.

But like other frightening building collapses — the condo tower in Surfside, Fla., which killed 98 people in 2021; or the downing of the World Trade Center from terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001 — the toll of destruction seems likely to linger.

By dusk Sunday, shock, grief and dust mingled in the air at the collapse site, where a sizable crowd was gathered. Volunteer rescuers from the police and the military wearing jumpsuits cycled in and out of the area. At one point, a crane held two observers over the top of the rubble mountain as men in yellow hats stared up from below.

At the perimeter, the father of a Pakistani worker told reporters people were praying at temples all over Thailand, and that he hoped at least half the workers would come out alive.

Aubonrat Setnawet was also still hoping for good news about her husband. He had been on the 23rd floor of the building when the earthquake hit; she had been there too, working, but on the ground floor, not far from where she sat on Sunday in a soft plastic chair near a hard metal fence.

“No updates,” she said quietly. All she could point to were more relatives beside her, as the noisy grind of diggers and dump trucks filled the air.

At the market across the street, Jatupol Sawangphanich, 42, put tape over the slits of a metal grate protecting his tropical fish business.

“Every time they lift the rubble, the dust flies in this direction,” he said.

Beside him, the lights of a usually busy mall had gone dark. Its structural integrity still needed to be tested.

“This happened all over Bangkok,” he said. “I’d rather not go into tall buildings at all.”