SmartAID, an Israel-based tech aid charity, is helping restore vital phone and internet connections after a deadly earthquake hit Taiwan last week.

At least 10 people were killed and more than 1,000 were injured after the 7.4 magnitude earthquake hit Hualien County on Taiwan’s mountainous eastern coast on April 3. Another 700 people were trapped in wreckage.

The earthquake is the strongest to have hit Taiwan, an island with a history of earthquakes, in almost 25 years. It was the same magnitude as a 1999 earthquake that claimed over 2,400 lives.

SmartAID has a local team that was already stationed in Taiwan’s capital, Taipei – which is now a nine-hour drive away from Hualien after landslides caused road closures – and is flying out more people from Israel.

The charity’s first priority is to provide power and communications for the 91,000 households hit by outages on the island 100 miles off the south-east coast of China.

“Our focus right now is telecommunications and electricity,” said Shachar Zahavi, who co-founded SmartAID in 2019 to provide a swift response and the innovative use of technology to those in need during times of crisis.

“We have sent two people to Taiwan and we have a group of local people there,” he said. “The best way to provide aid is through people who are already there and who understand the culture. That’s how we work everywhere across the world.”

SmartAID has been active in Australia, Indonesia, Italy, Mexico, the Philippines, Peru, Brazil and India. It has been helping in Ukraine since Russia invaded two years ago, in Morocco where an earthquake killed over 2,000 last September, and in Hawaii, which was recently devastated by wildfires.