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Buildings are rising all over the city, emblems of economic growth. But an earthquake that sent one crashing to the ground has stirred fears about building safety.
March 30, 2025Updated 6:24 a.m. ET
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. A 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.
