Global News Podcast - State of emergency declared in Myanmar after huge earthquake

Episode Date: March 28, 2025

Myanmar's military rulers urge people to donate blood and medical supplies. The tremors reached as far as the Thai capital, Bangkok, over 1,000 kilometres away where a high rise building under construction has collapsed.

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This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Alex Ritson and at 14h GMT on Friday 28th March these are our main stories. A huge 7.7 magnitude earthquake has struck central Myanmar causing damage over a large area. The tremors reached as far as the Thai capital Bangkok, a thousand kilometres away, where a high-rise building under construction has collapsed. Also in this podcast, the US Vice President JD Vance is to visit Greenland today, leading a high-level delegation to America's most northerly military base. And refugees fleeing the war in the DRC, the Democratic Republic of Congo, say they don't want to move to a much larger camp in Burundi.

Those who are already at the camp say they are suffering. I'm wondering if I agree to relocate, what happens to the children who are left in Congo? They won't find me. A powerful earthquake has struck parts of South East Asia with its epicentre close to Mandalay in Myanmar. Several buildings are reported to have collapsed and a state of emergency has been declared across large parts of the country.

Strong tremors extended into Thailand and Yunnan in southwest China. The US Geological Survey said it had a magnitude of 7.7 and was just 10 kilometres deep. The military government in Myanmar has requested aid from abroad to help with the rescue operation. The earthquake was centred in Sagaing. I guess there can be more casualties in Sagaing. Therefore, we declared a state of emergency. We want the international community to give humanitarian aid as soon as possible.

We'll hear from Bangkok in a moment, but first let's hear from a South African resident living in Yangon, the country's largest city. He described what it was like when the earthquake hit. In Myanmar we usually have an earthquake every now and then but nothing this severe and this seemed to last forever. It was like more than a minute. We were even on the ground floor, couldn't stand up, you sort of fall over. So it was definitely very intimidating. In Yangon it seems to be quite okay, there's not too much damage but in Mandalay and the UNESCO World Heritage Site, Bagan, it seems to be quite severe, the damage. There's images and videos circulating online now of hospitals that collapsed and pagodas in Bagan that collapsed.

So it's all coming to light now, but it seems very grim, to be honest. We've just heard that they've announced a state of emergency and asked for humanitarian help, which is quite unique for the situation in Myanmar to do that, but they did. But I think everyone's trying to just scope out what the situation is first. I know that there's no power in Mandalay or Bagan in Yangon. We had a long power cut too during or just after the earthquake, which is normal, but it usually comes back and it didn't. And I know Mandalay is still in the dark.

So I think all the humanitarian authorities are just trying to find out what the situation is because there's no power up there. So it's hard to get a grasp of what the situation really is. Mandalay is a very flat city. It's not a city that has very many high rises, but like all the pictures that we've seen is like four story buildings that's considered the norm in Mandalay that have collapsed, which is very rare. It's not normal. Like three weeks ago,

we had a 5.2 on the Richter scale that hit just outside Yangon and also felt in Mandalay and there wasn't damage at all. But I think this was just off the charts really. And I think that's why it's been so bad. So it's been quite unique in the fact that even the lower buildings have been collapsing, which isn't the norm usually. For the latest on what's happening in Myanmar, here's our former Asia editor Rebecca Henschke. My BBC Burmese colleagues are getting reports and images and videos from Mandalay mainly and the situation is very grim. They're getting reports now of schools collapsing at least five hotels in Mandalay and also significant historic buildings in the city.

So an ancient mosque, also a monastery has collapsed and they're also getting images of fires that have broken out in some of the universities in that city and also images of makeshift hospitals, so beds out in the open with people with serious wounds trying to be treated. So it's a very chaotic and very bleak picture that we're getting. The military has asked for international help. That's rare in itself, isn't it? It is. Since seizing power in a coup nearly four years ago, the Myanmar military has plunged the country into isolation. They have barred foreign journalists from entering, foreign aid agencies are severely restricted, they're restricted communications and they're waging a civil war against a pro-democracy

uprising. So for them to say we now need help is a sign of how serious the situation is. And Rebecca, the fear must be that the death toll here could really rise. Definitely, and the situation in Myanmar before this earthquake was dire. We're talking about millions of people displaced because of the civil war. The United Nations was already warning that a third of the country would need aid this year. So that situation, coupled with the civil war, means that this is going to be bad. Our former Asia editor, Rebecca Henschke. In Thailand, powerful tremors have caused substantial damage in the capital, Bangkok, a thousand kilometres, to the south of Mandalay.

Rescuers are trying to reach dozens of workers trapped in the rubble of a skyscraper which collapsed while under construction. Video footage posted on social media showed the moment the building came down as workers ran for their lives. The authorities in Bangkok have declared the city a disaster area. Bui Tu, a reporter for the BBC Vietnamese Service living in Bangkok, described how she fled her home after the earthquake struck. I was cooking when the initial earthquake hit my buildings and I thought it was just I was having a vertigo, I was having a disease because it has been a decades I believe that

Bangkok has not had experienced any earthquake like that. So I was literally like ignoring in the place. And then when the second earthquake hit and it's hit very hard and I felt like I was shaking and I can see all the stuff on the table was kind of like moving and I was like, Oh my gosh, and I was literally hearing my neighbors yelling and I opened the doors and I saw people like running and I joined with them. I heard more from Pernisa Anok of the BBC's Thai Service. I'm sitting on the bridge that overlooks into the site from a little bit of the bird-eye view.

We have seen that there's a high of concrete as tall as about three storey building. It does high up that collapse was actually actually 30 story building that was on construction. At the moment, I see that there's a lot of rescue people. There's a lot of police, also a lot of military prisoners that went inside and stayed inside of the field. At the moment, the scene is already quite dark. It's already about to be 7 p.m. in the afternoon, local time. We have seen that the prime minister has arrived at the scenes and the people are still trying

to rescue. We have seen local rescue people. There seem to be two persons out of the collapsing things. As you say, it was a 30-storey building that was under construction. I've seen the video that it collapsed which is circulating on the internet. It looks terrifying and as you say a lot of people inside. Yeah exactly. Earlier I actually talked to two workers who flee from that building that collapsed. The first one was an 18-year-old person. he was walking down from the sixth floor. Fortunately, the moment that

Thailand started to feel the shakiness, he was on the ground floor. And then within one minute, he said everything went black and smoke everywhere, couldn't really breathe. And the Thai authorities have declared the city of Bangkok a disaster area. Yeah, so the Bangkok governors and a lot of the prime minister is already at the scene as well and they're inspecting and told them for the beginnings about two, three hours after the collapse and after the shirkiness that happened around 1pm, a lot of school has been instructed to send their kids back home. A lot of office workers, they're advised not to

go back inside of the total building for two, three hours because people were afraid of the aftershock that will come after that. But yeah, at the moment, at the scene where we are, at the jettison shaft where the buildings collapsed, you can't actually, the car can't get in because it's full of rescue cars. Panisa Ernoch. As we've heard, the picture in Myanmar is still confused. The United States Geological Survey has warned the damage is likely to be widespread and that thousands may have died. Myanmar's state media says two bridges have collapsed and buildings

are damaged across five cities. Dr. Richard Luckett is from the British Geological Survey and he told Christian Fraser what is happening to cause this seismic event. It is pretty shallow in geological terms, but in fact it has reached the surface because an earthquake like this is big, which means that the fault that has moved

is 200 kilometers long. At the longest point it's moved about five meters, and in height it's come up from 10 kilometers down all the way to the surface. So it's a really large rock interface that has moved to cause an earthquake this big. Right, okay. So what is happening in that part of the world to create an earthquake of that magnitude? It's plate tectonics. The India plate is shifting north. It's actually what's causing the Himalayas.

The India plate is piling into the Eurasian plate in China and pushing up the Himalayas, which are growing constantly. And in this particular place, the India plate is moving north about five centimetres a year, but to the east of it, the plate, a different plate, is not moving nearly as much. So what you've got is the western part of the land moving more than the eastern chunk, and you've got this massive fault right on that boundary. I know you're always asked this question but what does it mean going forward in the days ahead? Can you predict at all the size of the aftershocks and how many there might be?

Well no, but you can forecast that there will be a lot of aftershocks, many of them will be big enough to be felt and some of them like the first one, the 6.4, will be damaging in their own right and some of them like the first one, the 6.4, will be damaging in their own right. They tend to drop off with size so you get the biggest aftershocks soon after the earthquake. As the days and the weeks go by the aftershocks will continue but in general they'll get smaller. We're trying to put our finger on the scale of what we're dealing with here. For someone who has vast experience of earthquakes, what would you assess will be the damage across these three countries?

Well, certainly the damage in Myanmar will be big. I mean, look at the damage in Bangkok and you kilometres away from a city with 1.2 million people in, we think there's sort of maybe well over 2 million people within the area of maximum shaking. So, we can expect a lot of casualties, I'm afraid. Dr Richard Luckett from the British Geological Survey. The American Vice President JD Vance and his wife Usha will arrive in Greenland later for a visit that's been scaled back to avoid protesters who are furious with President Trump.

He's repeated his threats to annex the self-governing Danish territory. He made his position very clear on Wednesday when he spoke to the journalist Vince Colleanesse on his podcast. We need Greenland for international safety and security. We need it. We have to have it. And so I hate to put it that way, but we're going to have to have it. Marcus Valentin, a journalist with Greenland's national broadcaster KNR, was asked why he thought Mr Trump had staked his claim. That's the million dollar question. We don't know exactly why it is that Donald Trump is so interested in Greenland because from the Danish, from the Greenland perspective, there is a military agreement with the US and there is goodwill between Denmark, Greenland and the US too.

If the US would want to make more military bases or amp up their military presence in Greenland, it could easily be done through this already established agreement between Greenland, Denmark and the US. Instead of watching a traditional dogsled race and a visit to Greenland's capital, Nuke, Mrs Vance has instead been forced to limit her trip to a remote American military base. Mr Vance is travelling with her. I asked Mariam Mishiri in Greenland's capital nuke why the island matters so much to President Trump and the United States. It's a vast territory. 56,000 people live here, but it's the biggest island in the world.

And one of the things that really matters here for the United States is the fact that there are vast amounts of untapped resources on this island, particularly I'm talking about oil reserves and mineral reserves, which of course are key for advanced technologies globally. Now, Greenlanders, as you mentioned, are unhappy. They have pushed back a lot against this visit, and that's meant that the visit has changed markedly from the bells and whistles cultural fun affair that it was supposed to be to something far more perfunctory. Mr. Vance, the Vice President, and his wife Usha will be visiting the military space space in the northwest of the island. And they'll be joined also by Mike Waltz, National Security Advisor, and also the Energy Secretary, Chris Wright.

Now, as your previous guest mentioned, there is a defence treaty between the United States and Denmark signed in the 1950s, which means that the United States can, if it wants, expand itself militarily in this country. But clearly the point that Mr Trump is making is that he and the administration want a lot more. Does anyone in Greenland seriously believe that President Trump will take over the island? I don't think it's a matter of seriously believing or not seriously believing. I think Greenlanders are very very upset by this. I've spoken to a fair few in the time that I've been here and what they all say to me is that Greenland is not

for sale. They say they feel very uneasy about the political agenda that they believe is behind this visit. Now Greenland has a very complicated relationship with Denmark. Of course, it is a semi-autonomous region of Denmark and it's trying in its way to move further and further away from Denmark and closer to independence. Now remember, there was an agreement signed, the Greenland Self-Government Act in 2009, between Denmark and Greenland, which allows Greenland to declare independence if it so wishes. Most agree this is what they want, but economic reliance on the Danish subsidies in particular

makes this very complicated. So to have the United States coming in now, talking in this way, staking a claim to Greenland, which many, many here say is completely spurious, is upsetting a lot of people. And so whether they believe it's going to happen or not, it's something they do not have the mental headspace to think about. They're thinking about their future and independence from Denmark. Mariam Mashiri. Still to come in this podcast, the genetic secret of horses.

We've made a deal with the devil life billions of years ago that really screams to us. This is not a random thing. This was important for their evolution. by its war with Israel. Now even some supporters are questioning its purpose. So is this a turning point? Join me, Hugo Bashega, as I travel to the heartland of the movement to find out. Listen now by searching for the documentary wherever you get to your BBC podcasts. Thousands of refugees who fled the fighting in the Democratic Republic of Congo sheltering at a temporary camp in neighbouring Burundi. They say there's not enough food to go around and are refusing to transfer to a much bigger camp, some 200 kilometres from the border, where they believe the conditions will be even worse.

Nomser Maseko sent this report from Burundi. A row of buses are parked outside Rugombo football stadium in Chippe-Toki province where a temporary camp was set up to receive thousands of Congolese who fled fighting. They've been waiting to transport the refugees to the Mosegni site located in the south of the country. But tensions have persisted for several days as many have rejected the transfer and want to stay at this transit camp which is a few kilometres from the DRC border. They barely have enough food to eat here and fear that the situation could be worse at the new refugee camp which can house 10,000 people. We don't want to go to the camps in Rwutana because amongst us there are people who have fled but are economically okay. Going to that refugee camp is the same as being amputated. We will

be solely dependent on others. Those who are already at the camp say they are suffering. They don't have shelter and have no way of coming back. At this temporary camp, the refugees are divided with some opting to be relocated. I have agreed to go to the camp because the fighting is really bad in Kamanyora. My brother, my father, the entire family has been killed. I'm the only one remaining, so there is no point returning to the DRC. I spoke to Burundi's president, Tavaristan Daishimiye, about this issue. We didn't invite them. They came as refugees because of the war.

If they see that they have peace in their heart, they can go back. If a visitor has come to your family or house, is you who choose the room where he will stay? Is not the visitor who room where he will stay? Is not the visitor who say, I will sleep here? No, it's you. And if he refuse the room that you prepared for him, you say, okay, is that you will not sleep here? You have somewhere to sleep.

Burundi alone has received nearly 100,000 refugees from the DRC since January, while United Nations data indicates that over 3 million people have been internally displaced. Despite a ceasefire, sporadic fighting is still being reported in various parts of eastern DRC. Nomsa Maseko in Burundi. The economies of Canada and the US are closely linked with hundreds of billions of dollars in goods and services crossing the border every year. But the new Canadian Prime Minister, Mark Carney, has said the era of deep ties is over after President Trump imposed steep tariffs on global car imports. Mr. Carney

said the levies violated a 60 year old agreement. Let's be clear, we're all on the same page. We won't back down. We will respond forcefully. Nothing is off the table to defend our workers and our country. What exactly the United States does next is unclear. But what is clear is that we as Canadians have agency. We are masters in our own home. We can control our destiny. The relationship with the US has been dominating campaign rallies ahead of Canada's general election next month. Airline bookings between Canada and the US are already down over 70% compared with the same period last year. So what else are Canadians boycotting? Haley Woodin is a Canadian business journalist based

in Vancouver. She spoke to the BBC's Evan Davis. I would say this movement toward buy Canadian and avoid buying American is palpable and that's sort of unique in Canada where we don't really typically tend to get very patriotic and we don't necessarily rally around the Canadian brand. But we're seeing it and Canadians have to look no further than a local grocery store for example that likely has signage identifying which products are Canadian. You see it and hear it in ads from Canadian companies talking about why you should buy a Canadian engagement ring or why some soups, for example, carry a tariff aftertaste and so you should buy your food products in Canada. There's some humor

around it, but I think the underlying sentiment is quite serious and it's not just about supporting the Canadian economy or Canadian businesses. It's very much a vote from consumers about not wanting to support the US economy and specifically the Trump administration. I mean, we were in our office, we're trying to work out what you wouldn't buy here if you didn't want to buy American. And people kept coming back to things that are actually not American, but American companies, you know, McDonald's burgers, quintessential American product. It's not really an American product when you buy it in the town in the UK.

Are people boycotting American companies even if the product is Canadian? Yes, we are seeing some American companies that have operations here in products in Canada and employ folks in Canada try to also get on board this by Canada bandwagon. And I think consumers are being very discerning about what they consider to be truly Canadian or not. As a personal example, I took an Uber ride, Uber obviously an American company, but the driver was local. And so I think that really speaks to the fact that all of our economies are integrated to a certain degree and that is especially true for the Canada-US relationship.

There's no such thing as a Canada made car and in some instances, components cross the border up to eight times. So yes, you can have an impact. You can maybe watch a Canadian independent film by a product that's truly just made in Canada. But for the bulk of trade between our two economies, a lot of that's integrated. And it's not as simple as saying this is strictly from Canada or strictly from the US. I actually couldn't really believe this figure that flight bookings might be 70% down on the equivalent period last year. Does that ring true to you? It does.

Anecdotally, a lot of Canadians cancelling trips, even being willing to eat the cost of having to do so. Our Premier in British Columbia had to tell his kids that their trip to Disneyland was cancelled. So depending on who you are and how clearly you want to try and support Canadian, those decisions are being made. And we're seeing it also in all forms of travel. Road trips, for example, last month were down to a level not seen since during the COVID pandemic when travel restrictions were in place. So Canadians are at least this point in

time really trying to vote with their dollars to support Canadian and to vote against the US. A big question that we have is how long that can be sustained because of course with tariffs being imposed potentially things will get more expensive and I think buying and trying to find cost savings will ultimately be factored into decisions too. It can't just be emotional purchasing. Vancouver business journalist Hayley Wooden. As you may have heard in our earlier edition of the Global News podcast, a BBC correspondent who has been covering the protests in Turkey has been deported to the UK. Mark Lowen, who was the BBC's correspondent in Turkey for five years, was told that he

was a threat to public order. Hundreds of thousands of people have been demonstrating, following the arrest of Istanbul's Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu on corruption allegations. And more than 1,400 people have been arrested, including several journalists. Mark Lowen told me about what happened to him. It was quite an adventure, Alex, I have to say. Not exactly the way that I would have liked my time in Turkey to end. I arrived in Istanbul last Sunday to cover the ongoing anti-government protests after the arrest of the mayor of Istanbul Ekremi Mamolu nine

days ago. On Wednesday afternoon, the phone in the room rang and it was the hotel receptionist saying, Mr. Owen, we would like to discuss something urgently with you in person. Could you please come down? And when I arrived, I was met by three plainclothes policemen who whisked me off to the police station in Istanbul headquarters, where I was kept for seven hours. I was allowed to have a couple of my colleagues there, and I was allowed to meet lawyers and have communication a bit with the outside world. There the atmosphere was was quite relatively cordial. A couple of the policemen were sort of hugging me and saying, you know, I'm sorry, this is the state that is doing this, we don't

believe in this and you're a good man, we want you to be free. And then after seven hours my colleagues were sent off and I was taken to the second of three locations, the Foreigner custody Department of Istanbul Police, where I was held for another five hours and there the attitude hardened a bit and I was fingerprinted and then given a paper at 2.30 in the morning after 12 hours saying I was a threat to public order and I would be deported and then I was taken to a third location which was the Foreigner Custody Unit in the airport for another five hours and at 8 o'clock in the morning put on a deportation flight back

to London. Because I'd heard your reports from previous days where you'd been speaking to people in the streets in Istanbul and they were telling you that they were worried about police coming and knocking on their doors in the morning just for being out on the streets protesting. Exactly, I mean in fact I spoke to somebody the day before I was detained who said to me, you know, they were all covering their faces at a university sit-in protest and I said to them, you know, why were all covering their faces at a university sit-in protest. And I said to them, you know, why are you covering your faces? And they said, because

the police are coming to our houses at six o'clock in the morning without warning and detaining us and trying to find out who was taking part in these protests. And sure enough, the day later, that's what they did to me, although not at six o'clock in the morning. And I have to say, I was not mistreated at any time, even though the whole experience was relatively unpleasant. I caught a glimpse at first hand of what so many in the country are going through. When I lived in Turkey as the BBC Istanbul correspondent between 2014 and 2019,

it was the world's biggest jailer of journalists. Turkey ranks 158th of 180 countries in the press freedom index of the watchdog Reporters Without Borders. There has been a progressive clampdown on the media, free speech and other tenets of democracy. I had the full support of the BBC behind me, the British consulate, but so many others don't. And in the protests alone over the last nine days, almost 1,900 people have been detained, including 11 journalists. So this was very much a taste of what many others in the country are experiencing, albeit in a much more dramatic way.

Mark Lohan. Next, an evolutionary success story. US researchers have uncovered an unlikely mutation that happened millions of years ago that separates horses from other mammals by giving them such athletic ability. Biologist Gianni Castiglione from Vanderbilt University in the US explained to Roland Pease what they found. The starting point was produced by natural selection. 50 million years or so of predators trying to catch horses, conan horses became better and better at escaping, running faster, having longer endurance. They have remarkably huge lungs, heart.

They have over 200,000 kilometers of capillaries. They actually go through nearly 400 liters of oxygen every minute when they're running. And yet despite this incredible ability to deliver oxygen to muscle tissues the muscles still cannot get enough. They're really at the physiological limit of how much oxygen you can take in and how much energy you can produce. We've made a deal with the devil life billions of years ago where we use oxygen to produce energy it's fantastic but we essentially

have a slow burning fire in our bodies. You know, something's getting burned and something's getting damaged. Unlike a fire, our bodies are able to recover from the damaging effects. And so what horses have done is they're able to make this fire even bigger and they're able to prevent it from causing any damage. So it's this twofold ability they've enhanced just through a single mutation. So this really was an advantage in this case. It's a textbook example of evolution where the fossils are almost a stepwise progression. They show how horses went from a dog-sized ancestor all the way up to the modern horse.

So we know the trajectory that evolution was pushing them in. And so when we see this mutation, and it's not just the one mutation, the mutation would have been lethal on its own. We see other mutations that co-evolved that compensate for that and really produce something greater than the sum of its parts and it's this coordination that really screams to us this is not a random thing. This was important for their evolution. Gianni Castiglione and you can hear more on this story in this week's Science in Action on the BBC World Service or wherever you get your BBC podcasts. And that's all from us for now.

But there will be a new edition of the Global News podcast later. If you want to comment on this podcast or the topics covered in it, you can send us an email. The address is globalpodcast at bbc.co.uk. You can also find us on x at bbcworldservice, use the hashtag globalnewspod. This edition was produced by Alice Adderley and was mixed by Adrian Bargava. The editor is Karen Martin. I'm Alex Ritzen. Until next time, goodbye. Available now on the Documentary from the BBC World Service. Hezbollah, the powerful Lebanese militia group, has been battered by its war with Israel. Now, even some supporters are questioning its purpose.

So, is this a turning point? Join me, Hugo Bashega, as I travel to the heartland of the movement to find out. Listen now by searching for the Document documentary wherever you get your BBC podcasts.