Northern Philippines quakes kill 8
MANILA, Philippines – Two earthquakes hours apart struck a group of sparsely populated islands in the Luzon Strait in the northern Philippines early Saturday, killing at least eight people, injuring about 60 and damaging ancestral houses famous among tourists.
The quakes collapsed homes of stone and wood and roused residents from sleep, said Roldan Esdicul, who heads the Batanes provincial disasterresponse office. Footage showed people clearing boulder-size stone bricks to pull out one body from the rubble.
“Our bed and everything were swaying from side to side like a hammock,” Esdicul said. “We all ran out to safety.”
On hard-hit Itbayat island, teacher Agnes Salengua-Nico said she and her husband woke up horrified with the ground shaking and a cabinet crashing to the floor. Their house withstood the shaking but others in the neighborhood crumbled, pinning residents inside, she said.
“We’re out now in the farm with our three pigs because we’re very, very scared of the aftershocks,” she said.
More than 2,000 residents of Itbayat were advised not to return to their homes and stay in the town plaza as successive aftershocks shook the region, Esdicul said.
Army troops and additional doctors later flew in after Itbayat’s airport runway was declared safe.
One of the world’s most disasterprone countries, the Philippines has frequent earthquakes and volcanic eruptions because it lies on the socalled Pacific “Ring of Fire,” a seismically active arc of volcanos and fault lines in the Pacific Basin. A magnitude 7.7 quake killed nearly 2,000 people in the northern Philippines in 1990.
Saturday’s quakes measured 5.4 and 5.9 at relatively shallow depths, the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology said. A third quake with a magnitude of 5.8 struck at sea west of Batanes later Saturday, it said.