Lying in his bed, Liao Xiu Bo wondered if he was about to die. As a powerful earthquake rocked the ground beneath him, he tried to escape his house. “Am I going to be crushed?”, he asked himself, before gathering the courage to run down the stairs, which swayed beneath his feet.

Outside, he could see that the wall surrounding his house had collapsed, its bricks littered across the road. “That’s when I realised how extreme the earthquake was”.

Liao’s house in Hualien, a popular tourist city on the east coast of Taiwan, was just a few kilometres away from the epicentre of the quake, which struck on Wednesday morning with a magnitude of 7.2, and has left more 1,000 people injured and at least 10 dead. On Friday, rescuers were still looking for 18 people missing.

“For people in Hualien, earthquakes are a part of everyday life,” Liao said. “But this earthquake was different from the others.” And worse was to come.

As Liao assessed the damage to his home on Wednesday morning, he saw on the news that the Uranus building, only a few blocks away, had partially collapsed.

His thoughts immediately went to his friend and longtime customer at his bar, who he knew lived in the building. “I started calling her, but I couldn’t get through. I recorded a short voice memo and said: ‘I saw the news, can you send me a message, I’m really worried if you’re safe.’”

She never responded.

Having initially escaped the crumbling building, she had returned to rescue her cat, only for the walls to collapse around her, Liao explained.

“She was only 33 years old; she was such a bright and kind-hearted person,” he said. “When I heard the news, I really felt like I’d lost a family member.”

In the east of the city, next to a normally bustling night market, the 10-storey Uranus building is now slumped over at an awkward angle, after its lower floors collapsed during the quake.

The building, now being prepared for demolition, has come to represent the damage wreaked by the largest earthquake to hit Taiwan in 25 years.

It is among the 176 buildings across Hualien county that have been damaged or destroyed because of the quake, which has also left about 337 households without electricity, and 3,750 without water, according to local government officials.

As the earthquake began, Li Gomez, 47, found herself on the eighth floor of her hotel with her husband and two young daughters. “The pipes had burst, and water was pouring in. Things were falling off the wall, and the whole building was shaking violently,” she said.

“One of the workers in the hotel grabbed my daughter while I tried to get the door open and then my husband ran over to get our other daughter.”

“As soon as we ran out, we didn’t even think about putting our shoes on.”

They made their way to the train station but struggled to find a route out of the city. Many of the roads in and around Hualien, as well as the train lines linking to neighbouring cities, had sustained significant damage.

Unable to leave, they found themselves among the 213 displaced people scattered across makeshift rescue centres in Hualien county in schools and other municipal buildings.

Tending to her 94-year-old wheelchair-bound husband, Song De You, 66, explained that she left behind all her belongings when she came to the rescue centre in Zhonghua elementary school.

“I only brought my husband’s necessities and medicines with us because he has cancer,” she said.

With the number of aftershocks exceeding 300 and 76 buildings at risk of collapse, the number of people seeking shelter could still increase over the coming days.

“I can feel the earthquake in me as if it’s still happening. I feel dizzy and everything is still moving,” Song said.