Shane Su­perville

Se­nior Re­porter

shane.su­perville@guardian.co.tt

As emer­gency au­thor­i­ties and vol­un­teers in South­east Asia con­tin­ue to deal with the af­ter­math of a 7.7 mag­ni­tude earth­quake which left hun­dreds dead and in­jured, the Min­is­ter of For­eign and Cari­com Af­fairs Dr Amery Browne has con­firmed that no Trinida­di­ans were among those se­ri­ous­ly af­fect­ed.

Ac­cord­ing to re­ports from the BBC, at least 144 peo­ple were con­firmed dead af­ter the earth­quake in Myan­mar, while six peo­ple were con­firmed dead in Thai­land.

Re­spond­ing to Guardian Me­dia via What­sApp yes­ter­day, Dr Browne said that there were 15 T&T na­tion­als liv­ing in Thai­land who were reg­is­tered with his min­istry, not­ing that there were no re­ports of deaths or in­juries in­volv­ing them.

But while there were no in­juries or fa­tal­i­ties, Browne said his min­istry would con­tin­ue to pay close at­ten­tion to any de­vel­op­ments.

“Our em­bassy has en­gaged in com­mu­ni­ca­tion with them and has pro­vid­ed ad­di­tion­al guid­ance and modal­i­ties for fol­low-up should as­sis­tance be re­quired.”

In a video post­ed to his so­cial me­dia ac­count on Fri­day, Trinida­di­an ex­pat and dig­i­tal strate­gist Keron Rose, who lives and works in Thai­land, re­called feel­ing the move­ment while he was asleep in his apart­ment, which is lo­cat­ed on the 12th floor of a build­ing.

Rose joked that he had to run a “hun­dred-me­tre dash” and on­ly had time to put on his shoes and grab his bag be­fore fran­ti­cal­ly leav­ing the apart­ment.

“Right at that mo­ment I re­mem­bered my pass­port,” he said.

“I went to open back the door and couldn’t open it back be­cause I left my room key back in the room.

“We have a key­pad, but I couldn’t even punch in the pass­word to run back in and grab my pass­port.

“All the for­eign­ers kind of checked in, so I asked who man­aged to grab their pass­port, and they didn’t even think about that.”

In an­oth­er video post­ed on so­cial me­dia, Rose showed that while his apart­ment build­ing was still stand­ing, it did sus­tain some dam­age as glass and guard rails were de­stroyed as wa­ter was seen falling from the top floors in the af­ter­math of the earth­quake.