TAIWANESE FINDS TEARS COME EASY THESE DAYS

Shu-Ju Lulu Chuang can't stop crying.

She worries about the fate of friends in her earthquake-devastated country of Taiwan.

Chuang is one of a handful of Taiwanese students attending Southeast Missouri State University.

"Every time I watch the news I am crying," she said.

A student teacher at the Jackson Middle School, Chuang said she has been crying on her way to school the last few days. "I wipe my tears and start teaching and try to have a good time," said the 30-year-old Chuang, who formerly taught in Taiwan and is working toward a degree in special education.

The disaster, however, is never far from her thoughts.

The quake has killed more than 2,100 people and injured 7,800. Another 1,844 remain unaccounted for, including those buried under rubble and landslides.

Some 2,200 people have been rescued since the quake struck Tuesday, destroying more than 6,000 housing units on the island.

She has talked to her mother several times by telephone since the magnitude-7.6 earthquake struck Taiwan.

Her parents live in Taipei, a metropolitan area of some 2 million people.

The quake left the capital city without power. Her parents spent the first night in the dark.

"They didn't sleep the whole night," said Chuang. The siren sounds of ambulances and fire trucks could be heard throughout the night.

She said power has been rationed in recent days, with different areas getting power for a short time each day.

Chuang said a friend's 2-year-old daughter was injured. The family lived in the central part of Taiwan close to the epicenter of the quake.

Chuang said she doesn't know how badly the girl was injured.

The quake destroyed roads in central Taiwan, making it difficult for rescue teams to reach residents there.

Chuang said Taiwan has a history of quakes. But she said most of the quakes have occurred on the eastern side of the island rather than in the western, more populated area of the nation.

Much of the damage occurred in the central part of the country, home to popular vacation spots for Taiwanese.

This week marked the start of the biggest holiday in Taiwan. Many people this time of year typically head to vacation spots in the central part of the country, she said.

But once scenic areas remain in ruins.

Chuang said she wishes she could be home with her family and friends. "They are my people," she said. "It's my country."

Chuang said she wants to reach out to them. "They are suffering."

Many of Taiwan's high-rise buildings simply leaned, hanging precariously in space at improbable angles and curves.

Quake experts say building designs, the enforcement of construction codes and the quality of land that buildings rest upon all likely contributed to the way the structures were damaged in the quake.

Prosecutors in Taiwan announced the arrest of a contractor responsible for three buildings that collapsed, burying about 100 people. The buildings had been made with substandard steel rods, and authorities found crumpled vegetable oil cans had been used in place of bricks.

Engineers and seismologists from around the world are flying to Taiwan to find out why some buildings failed while others survived.

"It appears that in many cases in Taiwan, the ground floor of buildings was very weak structurally because there was a garage or a shop there," said Robert Geller, a professor of geophysics at Tokyo University.

A wide open ground floor without proper support leaves an entire building vulnerable to the potent, sideways motion generated by earthquakes, he said.

Buildings in which floors collapse atop one another may not have had enough horizontal support in the columns, said John Mander of the University of Buffalo's Multidisciplinary Center for Earthquake Engineering Research.

Buildings constructed on unstable land or filled-in swamps or rice paddies may be vulnerable to "liquefaction," where agitated ground water rises and mixes with the soil beneath building foundations. The ground liquifies, partially sinking, tilting or twisting the structures above.

"Liquefaction could happen in areas that used to be a paddy field or a pond," said Shozo Komaki, professor of earthquake engineering at Fukui Institute of Technology in Tokyo. "With a rapid increase in population and an increasing need to build facilities to cater to it, builders had to construct buildings in areas where people never lived before. Those areas tend to be not so solid."

Taiwan's bent buildings are not unique. During large earthquakes in Los Angeles, Japan, Greece and Turkey some structures were also knocked off their foundations and left tilted or leaning against other buildings.

Overall, Taiwan has suffered less damage than Kobe, Japan, which was hit by a less-powerful quake in 1995, said Taiwanese architect Chen Hung-ming.

Following the Kobe quake, Taiwan's building codes were toughened to consider not only horizontal shock effects but vertical shakes, he said.

"The damage could have been much greater," he said.

But those tougher standards did not apply to structures that had been completed during the building boom of earlier decades. And even the best codes are worthless if they are ignored.

The Associated Press contributed to this report