At the school, people slept bundled up in heavy blankets and wearing coats and caps.

“It wasn’t a normal earthquake, there have been more than 100 aftershocks,” said Wu Ching-hua, 62, a native of Hualien who woke early Thursday at the school. “We’ve had bigger quakes here many times before, but the aftershocks taper off gradually. Right now we don’t know what will happen.”



Mr. Wu’s daughter persuaded him to leave his home, in a five-story building next to a taller structure that she feared might topple.

Fan Chen-yuan, 30, was working the graveyard shift as a volunteer at the school.

“Twenty seconds after the main quake, a large aftershock followed, and I couldn’t sleep,” he recalled in an interview.

An hour later Mr. Fan, an employee of the city government, was volunteering at the arena, the first of the two shelters to open. “Lots of people ran out into the street after the quake, and they weren’t willing to go back into their homes,” he said.