Singapore is blessed as we are sheltered from natural disasters. Taiwan, however, isn’t so fortunate as Yvonne Lim discovered herself when she lived through a 6.7 magnitude earthquake on December 2020.
“Everybody [I talked to] agreed that it was pretty bad. [A friend] was saying that the building shook for around 50 seconds last night. It might sound really short, but when we going through it, it felt very long. It’s scary for me ‘cos I’m scared of earthquakes all along, and we stay on the highest level of our apartment building too, so the tremors felt worse for us.”
“It happened very suddenly, my kids were going to bed, so while the earthquake was happening, I had to dash to their rooms. [My husband] Alex picked up AJ, and I picked up Alexa, and we went to the living room. The kids hid under the dining table ‘cos that’s what they learnt in school. We were all just squatting there and praying, hoping for the earthquake to go away.”
“I felt dizzy the entire night, as if the building was still moving “There was another [aftershock] around 2 in the morning. It was a shorter one and the kids and Alex were all asleep. I was the only one awake ‘cos I was really freaked out, I didn’t dare to sleep, and stayed awake in case anything else happened.”
“I think us Singaporeans are lucky ‘cos we don’t have any earthquakes and tsunamis, I’m not sure about other [overseas Singaporeans], but personally, I’m really not used it. [Times like these] are when I really want to go home… back to Singapore.”
