The initial 7.7-magnitude quake struck near the central Myanmar city of Mandalay early Friday afternoon, followed minutes later by a 6.7-magnitude aftershock.
As dawn broke Sunday, tea shop owner Win Lwin picked his way through the remains of a collapsed restaurant on a main road in his neighbourhood, tossing bricks aside one by one.
“We don’t know how many bodies there could be but we are looking.”
Truckloads of firemen gathered at one of Mandalay's main fire stations to be dispatched to sites around the city.
Myanmar's ruling junta said in a statement Saturday that at least 1,644 people were killed and more than 3,400 injured in the country, with at least 139 more missing.
Junta chief Min Aung Hlaing issued an exceptionally rare appeal for international aid on Friday, indicating the severity of the calamity.
Myanmar has already been ravaged by four years of civil war sparked by a military coup in 2021.
The UN said overnight that a severe lack of medical equipment is hindering Myanmar's response to the quake, while aid agencies have warned that Myanmar is unprepared to deal with a disaster of this magnitude.
Rescue teams and aid have been arriving from donor countries around the world, with Thailand on Sunday dispatching 55 military personnel and six rescue dogs, along with equipment including cranes and diggers.
Across the border in Thailand, rescuers in Bangkok worked Sunday to pluck out survivors trapped when a 30-storey skyscraper under construction collapsed after the Friday earthquake.
Most of the deaths were workers killed in the tower collapse, while most of the missing are believed to be trapped under the immense pile of debris where the skyscraper once stood.
Sniffer dogs and thermal imaging drones have also been deployed to seek signs of life in the collapsed building, close to the Chatuchak weekend market popular among tourists.
Authorities said they would be deploying engineers to assess and repair 165 damaged buildings in the city on Sunday.
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