Being prepared

Photos and video footage showing people’s reaction to the magnitude 6.5 quake that hit mainly the Leyte area the other day had Boholanos and Cebuanos recalling their own experience with the magnitude 7.2 tremor that hit Bohol and Cebu in 2013. But I like SunStar Cebu’s contributed front page photo for the varied reactions shown by people on an Ormoc street at that rainy moment when the earth shook.

A report by the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology (Phivolcs) said the epicenter of the recent tremor was in Jaro town in Leyte. It did not take long before photos of the damage to some structures in Leyte began surfacing in social media. I was thankful the damage shown was not as bad as the 2013 quake. What can be more dramatic, for example, than the sight of crumbled churches?

I was in the SunStar Cebu office when the recent earthquake struck. Frankly, I didn’t feel anything, or many of us in the office didn’t. What I rather felt a few minutes later was amazement at how fast my Facebook friends flooded my page with posts about where they were and whether they felt the earth shook or not. That’s the advantage of modern technology, the connectivity.

Or should I say that’s the advantage of being able to connect to the Net, which in the current Philippine setting is actually still not that easy. In the 2013 quake, I was with my kids inside a sports complex when the ground shook violently and long. That shaking was punctuated by the grating sound of the glass portion of the gym’s wall and of the glass wall up a nearby structure.

I was immobilized for a while and momentarily forgot my boys who thankfully ran towards me even while the ground shook. I stood for a while on the oval even if the tremor was over trying to absorb what just happened. I dialed the cell phone I was carrying to find out the situation my wife, who was at home, was in. I could not connect. I went to the car and put on the stereo to listen to updates. I couldn’t find any as news and public affairs stations were immobilized for a while.

I herded my children inside the car and as we got out of the sports complex I could see some people living near the shoreline move to the upper portion of the town. It wasn’t exactly a tsunami scare, only a sight of people with the same mindset taking some precautions. A couple of years earlier, a powerful tsunami hit Japan and video footage of the devastation was used extensively in news reports. It had people worried every time earthquakes hit.

After the Bohol-Cebu tremor, the administration of President Noynoy Aquino through the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council, tried to raise the level of people’s preparation when earthquakes strike. I think we are seeing the product of that effort in some schools being able to use what was taught during earthquake drills when the real one hit the other day. But the sample is too few for us to say we are prepared.

Four years after a magnitude 7.2 earthquake struck Bohol, a magnitude 6.5 tremor hit the neighboring island of Leyte. Because Cebu is near both Bohol and Leyte, we were hit, too, although with milder shaking. What I am saying is everyone need to be prepared for any eventuality.