TAINAN, Taiwan -- Rescuers were searching today for people still missing after a powerful, shallow earthquake struck southern Taiwan before dawn Saturday, killing at least 19 people, injuring hundreds and causing a high-rise residential building to collapse.
Hundreds of people were rescued from the rubble in Tainan, the city hit worst by the quake. About 2,000 firefighters and soldiers scrambled with ladders, cranes and other equipment to the ruins of the 17-floor Wei Guan residential building, which folded like an accordion onto its side when the quake struck.
The emergency center in Tainan said that 171 people had been rescued from the collapsed building, 90 of whom were sent to a hospital. Another 104 people were rescued from other parts of the city, seven of whom received hospital treatment.
The rescue numbers were lower than the total of 334 that the city government had reported Saturday. There was no immediate explanation for the discrepancy.
Tainan Mayor Lai Ching-te said in TV interviews from the site of the building collapse that there were more than 100 people still trapped, many at the bottom of the wreckage.
Rescuer Su Yu-min said workers were trying to cut through walls and pillars to try to reach people trapped in the bottom part of the rubble.
"It takes a few hours to complete a search for just one household and sometimes it takes two hours just to go forward [12 inches]" when the way is blocked by a wall, he said.
The collapse had many wondering if the structure, built in 1989, had shoddy construction. Tainan's government said the building was not listed as a dangerous structure before the quake, and Taiwan's interior minister, Chen Wei-zen, said an investigation would examine whether the developer had cut corners during construction.
The earthquake also ripped a 10-foot chasm at a golf course, cut off water supplies to 400,000 people and halted high-speed rail service to the southern half of the island.
President Ma Ying-jeou visited a hospital and the emergency-response center in Tainan before rushing back to the capital, Taipei, to attend a briefing on the situation.
Wu Ching-Chung, a Tainan firefighter, said the situation at the building was complicated.
"Because the building collapsed so completely, there was no space left for the people inside -- no real pockets," he said. Nevertheless, firefighters believed there could still be people alive.
The quake came two days before the start of Lunar New Year celebrations to mark the most important family holiday in the Chinese calendar. The collapsed building had 256 registered residents, but far more people could have been inside when it fell because the population might have swelled ahead of the holiday, when families typically host guests.
Most people were asleep when the magnitude-6.4 earthquake hit at about 4 a.m., 22 miles southeast of Yujing. It struck only 6 miles underground, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Shallow earthquakes generally cause more damage than deeper ones.
Tainan resident Lin Bao-gui, a secondhand-car salesman whose cars were smashed when the building across the street from him collapsed, said his house first started "shaking horizontally, then up and down, then a big shake right to left."
"I stayed in my bed but jumped up when I heard a big bang, which was the sound of the building falling," he said.
The emergency center and the Tainan government said that 17 of the 19 confirmed deaths were from the building collapse.
Rescuers found the bodies of a 10-day-old infant, three other children and six adults at the collapsed building, Taiwan's emergency management information center said. Other deaths were reported at the site, but details were not immediately available.
Authorities said two people were killed by falling objects elsewhere in Tainan.
The Taiwanese news website ET Today reported that a mother and daughter were among the survivors from the building, and that the girl drank her urine while waiting to be rescued, which happened sooner than expected.
Rescuers went apartment to apartment, drawing red circles near windows of apartments they had searched.
"I went to the top floors of the middle part of the building, where we found five people, one of whom was in bed and already dead," said Liu Wen-bin, a rescuer from Taichung. "Some people were found in the shower, some in the bedroom."
Elsewhere in Tainan, dozens of other people were rescued or safely evacuated from damaged structures or buildings declared unsafe after the quake, including a market and a seven-floor building, authorities said. A bank building also careened, but no one was injured or trapped.
All told, nine buildings collapsed and five careened in Tainan, the emergency management information center said.
The quake disrupted bullet-train service during the busy Lunar New Year holiday period on the main north-south route from Taipei to Tainan. By late Saturday, some tracks had been repaired and trains were able to travel as far south as Chiayi, with shuttle buses available to those traveling on to Tainan.
The 69 power lines decimated by the quake affected more than 121,000 households in the city, according to the Taiwan Power Co. Rail authorities said power failures, not damage to tracks, were the reason for the suspension of train service.
The quake 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.
Earthquakes frequently rattle Taiwan, but most are minor and cause little or no damage. However, a magnitude-7.6 quake in central Taiwan in 1999 killed more than 2,300 people.
Information for this article was contributed by Gladys Tsai, Didi Tang and Ian Mader of The Associated Press and by Julie Makinen, Samuel Chan and Jonathan Kaiman of the Los Angeles Times.
A Section on 02/07/2016