At least 32 dead in Philippines after magnitude 7.8 quake hits, over 200 injured

At least 32 people were killed and more than 200 injured after a magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck the southern Philippines on Monday, toppling buildings, setting off landslides and sending panicked residents fleeing into the streets. One survivor told This Week in Asia the shaking was so violent “you couldn’t stand”. The casualty count remained fluid as rescue teams fanned out across Mindanao, with disaster-response officials reporting deaths from landslides, collapsed buildings, falling debris and a damaged mosque across several parts of the southern island. The deaths were reported in Sarangani, South Cotabato and Davao Occidental provinces, as well as in nearby General Santos, a port city and commercial hub, and on Balut Island off Mindanao’s southern coast. One of the clearest death tolls came from Sarangani, where Rene Punzalan, a disaster-mitigation official, told the DZBB radio network that 13 villagers were killed when a landslide hit houses in the mountainous town of Glan. Four other villagers died in Sarangani for still-unclear reasons, bringing the province’s reported death toll to 17, Punzalan said. At least seven people were killed in General Santos, where several small buildings collapsed or were badly damaged. A building on a school campus also collapsed and authorities were checking reports that students had been trapped. Police said at least 12 people were still missing in the city. Officials said thousands of villagers had been displaced, though detailed figures were still being consolidated. The quake, the strongest to strike the Philippines so far this year, hit at 7.37am at sea off Mindanao, an island about the size of South Korea, as schools were reopening after a long break. The Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology (Phivolcs) said it was centred about 32km southwest of Maasim town in Sarangani at a depth of 33km. Tremors were felt strongly across Mindanao and as far as Manado, on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, about 420km from the epicentre. “It’s a major earthquake,” said Teresito Bacolcol, director of Phivolcs, warning people to seek advice before returning to damaged buildings and houses that could collapse because of aftershocks. Filipino tech journalist Art Samaniego was on the 11th floor of a hotel in Davao City with his wife and son, a day before he was scheduled to give a cybersecurity talk in nearby Digos town, when the quake struck. “We were on the 11th floor. My wife was the first one to notice. I didn’t immediately feel it yet, but when I did, I suddenly fell to the ground because it was so strong, you couldn’t stand,” Samaniego told This Week in Asia. He said his family took cover under a table, then ran to the fire exit as soon as the shaking stopped. “I told my family first to grab their IDs on the table. I could hear cracking and creaking throughout the building, so I was expecting it to really collapse. My thinking was, if something happens to us, we can be identified. That was how serious it felt, you could feel the building almost giving in,” he said. Samaniego said the shaking felt different from other earthquakes he had experienced, describing it as continuous, violent and strong enough to repeatedly knock him down. When he and his family reached the ground, hotel guests had gathered in the parking area. They were briefly cleared to return inside, he said, but aftershocks twice forced them back out before engineering teams from the Department of the Interior and Local Government and Task Force Davao arrived to inspect the building. Police Major Roland Catoburan said two people were crushed to death by a collapsing wall in Alabel, a municipality near General Santos. “We have casualties. A wall fell on them,” he said. More than 100 students attending morning flag-raising ceremonies sustained bruises and some fainted in panic. A series of powerful aftershocks rocked the area about two hours after the first quake hit, the United States Geological Survey reported. Benjie Ancheta, police chief of Alabel, said cracks appeared in the walls of the police building immediately after the quake, which occurred during a flag-raising ceremony. “This is the strongest earthquake we’ve experienced,” Ancheta said. President Ferdinand Marcos Jnr ordered an immediate disaster response in Mindanao, with agencies directed to prepare relief supplies and evacuation centres and be ready for possible rescue operations. This is the strongest earthquake we’ve experienced Benjie Ancheta, police chief of Alabel town “The national government is moving and we will not leave Mindanao behind,” he said in a statement. Tsunami alerts were issued in the southern Philippines, northern Indonesia and the Malaysian state of Sabah on Borneo Island. Malaysia’s Meteorological Department issued a tsunami warning for Sabah, which is just a boat ride away from the southern Philippines. Waves of one metre were monitored in the Philippine provinces of Sultan Kudarat and Sarangani, while an 83cm (2.7-foot) tsunami was measured by a gauge off Indonesia’s Sulawesi island. Japanese authorities separately issued a tsunami advisory for its Pacific coast, projecting waves of up to one metre to hit different regions from 11.30am. The warnings were later lifted after 3pm local time after tsunami wave heights of 0.09 metres to 1.48 metres were recorded, which Phivolcs said were too small to cause damage. Phivolcs attributed the earthquake to the “subduction of the Cotabato Trench,” a deep underwater fault where one tectonic plate slides beneath another, generating powerful quakes and tsunamis. The same trench was responsible for the Philippines’ deadliest tsunami in 1976, when a magnitude 7.9 earthquake offshore triggered a nine-metre wave that claimed more than 7,000 lives. Ven Paolo Valenzuela, a research fellow at Singapore Management University’s College of Integrative Studies, said the areas hit by Monday’s quake were “geographically predisposed to geologic hazards”, which should have made them more prepared for such disasters. The severity of some of the damage, including videos showing the rapid collapse of a building housing a Jollibee outlet in General Santos, raised questions about how consistently building codes were being enforced across the country, he said. “What we saw today happened in General Santos City — a major city. And you can see these gaps in implementing the building code there. What does that say about code implementation across the entire country?” Valenzuela said. Valenzuela said provinces near the Cotabato Trench are classified as Zone 4, the highest risk category under the country’s building code, meaning structures in those areas should be able to withstand severe horizontal shaking, not just their vertical weight. “Under a minor earthquake, a building should be undamaged. Under a major earthquake like this one — magnitude 7.5, 7.8 — the building is allowed to crack, bend, and suffer major structural damage, but it must stay standing long enough for occupants to escape safely. That’s the philosophy of the structural code: life safety first,” Valenzuela said. He said recent earthquakes had exposed similar vulnerabilities, including a magnitude 6.9 quake in northern Cebu on September 30 that was centred near Bogo City and damaged homes, businesses, churches, bridges and seaports, followed 10 days later by powerful quakes off Davao Oriental that left homes, buildings and bridges damaged in parts of eastern Mindanao. “If one or two buildings are collapsing with this type of earthquake in different areas every year, something is wrong,” he said. Valenzuela said the Philippines also faced the risk of overlapping disasters, with floods and typhoons likely to dominate the coming months and warnings of a strong El Nino this year. He pointed to 2013, when a powerful earthquake struck Bohol in October and Super Typhoon Haiyan devastated parts of the central Philippines the following month. “When that happens, funds and response capacity get siphoned from one disaster recovery to another. That’s a dangerous cycle,” he said. The Philippines, one of the world’s most disaster-prone countries, is often hit by earthquakes and volcanic eruptions because of its location on the Pacific “Ring of Fire”, an arc of seismic faults around the ocean. The archipelago is also lashed by about 20 typhoons and tropical storms each year. A magnitude 6.9 quake in Cebu province in the central Philippines killed 76 people and destroyed or damaged 72,000 buildings in September, according to government figures. It was followed in October by powerful quakes off eastern Mindanao that killed at least eight people. Additional reporting by Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters

At least 32 dead in Philippines after magnitude 7.8 quake hits, over 200 injured

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Schools and buildings collapsed as residents fled, with rescue teams continuing to search for missing students

Schools and buildings collapsed as residents fled, with rescue teams continuing to search for missing students