Nine people stuck on a scenic mountain road after Taiwan's biggest earthquake in 25 years were rescued on Friday, images on television showed.
“I heard huge sound like an explosion ... I could do nothing but kept praying,” a woman rescued from the tunnel told reporters, according to Taiwan's SET News channel.
They had been stuck in the Tunnel of Nine Turns, a section of mountain trail in Taroko Gorge where overhanging rocks form open tunnels, affording stunning views in the national park.
In the eastern city of Hualien, around which Wednesday's massive 7.2-magnitude earthquake was centred, roads in mountainous areas were blocked by multiple landslides.
Interior Minister Lin Yu-chang, who chairs the Central Emergency Operation Centre (CEOC), said on Friday that hundreds of people were still stranded in some isolated sites in the national park but they are not in danger.
The death toll remained at 10 from the earthquake, but the number of injured rose to 1,123, with 634 people trapped. Thirteen people are missing, including a Canadian national and two Singaporeans holding Australian passports.
On Friday, rescue teams found two people pinned down under a pile of huge rocks with no signs of life, according to the National Fire Agency (NFA). Rescue workers were still trying to remove the two bodies, officials said. Once identified, they would take the death toll to 12.
At Silks Place Taroko Hotel, around 400 people were still trapped, but 58 people had been rescued from there by helicopter on Friday, Interior Minister Lin said in an update in the afternoon.
On Friday, about 400 kilograms of supplies were sent by helicopters to the site, including food, drinking water and medicine for about three to four days, Lin said.
Helicopters sending supplies to isolated sites also brought out dozens of children, sick residents and tourists for medical treatment, local TV footage showed.
According to the Central Weather Administration (CWA), since the major quake on Wednesday, there have been more than 500 aftershocks. Wu Chien-fu, director of the Seismology Centre of the CWA said on Friday that it still cannot be ruled out that strong aftershocks will occur.
The earthquake on Wednesday was strongest to hit Taiwan in 25 years. In September 1999, the island on the boundary between the Eurasian and the Philippine Sea plates was hit by a 7.3-magnitude earthquake that left more than 2,400 people dead.
After the big one in 1999, Taiwan started revising building codes to improve earthquake resistance.
To promote awareness, Taiwan also applied new technologies to disaster prevention education programmes and learned some disaster prevention experience and mechanisms from Japan.
More government budgets were also allocated to improve active earthquake observation by strengthening the capability of real-time seismic measuring stations across the country.