Myanmar earthquake survivors without food and shelter, aid groups say

Aid groups in the worst-hit areas of Myanmar said there was an urgent need for shelter, food and water after an earthquake that killed more than 2,700 people, but said the country's civil war could prevent help reaching those in need.

The death toll had reached 2,719 and is expected to rise to more than 3,000, Myanmar's military leader Min Aung Hlaing said in a televised address on Tuesday. He said 4,521 people were injured, and 441 were missing.

The 7.7 magnitude quake, which hit around lunchtime on Friday, was the strongest to hit the Southeast Asian country in more than a century, toppling ancient pagodas and modern buildings alike.

In Myanmar's Mandalay area, 50 children and two teachers were killed when their preschool collapsed, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said.

"In the hardest-hit areas ... communities struggle to meet their basic needs, such as access to clean water and sanitation, while emergency teams work tirelessly to locate survivors and provide life-saving aid," the UN body said in a report.

The International Rescue Committee said shelter, food, water and medical help were all needed in places such as Mandalay, near the epicentre of the quake.

"Having lived through the terror of the earthquake, people now fear aftershocks and are sleeping outside on roads or in open fields," an IRC worker in Mandalay said in a report.

The U.S. State Department on Monday said that a U.S. Agency for International Development team (USAID) was heading to Myanmar to help identify the country's most pressing needs but a former top USAID official said the overall response from Donald Trump's administration response has been hobbled by the huge fund cuts, contractor terminations and plans to fire nearly all staff.

The response has been hurt by "a lot of internal confusion about capability to respond and willingness to respond," said Sarah Charles, who headed the agency's humanitarian assistance bureau until February 2024. 

Speaking at a daily briefing, State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce rejected criticism that funding and personnel cuts were impeding USAID's response and said that Washington was working with partners in Myanmar to get help to affected people.

Trump, through an initiative led by billionaire adviser Elon Musk, in February began the process of closing USAID and merging its operations into the State Department. Thousands of staff were placed on administrative leave, hundreds of contractors were fired and more than 5,000 programs terminated, disrupting global humanitarian aid efforts on which millions depend.

On Friday, the day the earthquake struck Myanmar and Thailand, the administration told Congress that it was firing nearly all remaining USAID personnel and closing its foreign missions.

The processes that trigger rapid USAID disaster responses "that were pretty automatic" no longer are, and the "process of getting approval to do things, the process of deploying people, is all being negotiated in real time," said Charles.

According to Human Rights Myanmar, an aid group, the U.S. accounted for a quarter of all aid to Myanmar before Trump was inaugurated, and U.S. assistance was seen as crucial for the Rohingya refugees who fled the country and languish in camps in Thailand and Bangladesh.