Quake death toll reaches 7

MANILA, Philippines — The death toll from a powerful quake that hit Mindanao last weekend has hit seven, the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council (NDRRMC) said yesterday.

NDRRMC spokesman Mark Timbal said of the seven fatalities, three were from the town of Padada, one from Matanao, one from Hagonoy, one from Magsaysay and another from Malita, all in Davao del Sur.

Rescuers have pulled three bodies from a collapsed grocery store in Padada where two other fatalities are still trapped under slabs of cement, officials said. Some 49 people were initially reported injured from the quake.

A total of 1,951 families or 9,755 individuals from the 12 villages were affected by last Sunday’s magnitude 6.9 earthquake, which as of yesterday has already registered 556 aftershocks.

The tremor also damaged 36 public structures in Davao region and Central Mindanao, Timbal said.

Some 42 schools have sustained major infrastructure damage, affecting thousands of students in the region, officials of the Department of Education added.

The Department of Health also reported seven medical facilities in the region were damaged, forcibly evacuating thousands of patients to makeshift tents.

Rains and strong aftershocks halted retrieval operations as rescuers have shifted from search and rescue to search and recovery operations.

Bureau of Fire Protection (BFP) regional director Col. Fred Trajeras, whose unit is directly tasked to search for survivors under collapsed structures, said that they are now shifting to retrieval operations.

“For the information of everybody, our function or our task for today is exclusively for retrieval operations. No more search and rescue,” Trajeras said.

He added rescuers have not detected signs of life under collapsed structures in the quake-ravaged towns of Padada, Hagonoy and Magsaysay.

Distraught relatives had waited in a cordoned area as rescuers worked overnight to search for their relatives.

Trajeras said the rescue team is looking for the source of the signs of life detected in Padada last Monday.

He said they are looking for one more fatality. Rescuers are not sure whether the source was a person or an animal but their detecting device had not registered any signs of life.

“Based on the devices we use, we can no longer find any heartbeat inside,” disaster officer Christopher Tan told dzMM.

Trajeras added all the employees of the collapsed grocery store in Padada were already accounted for and no other families reported that a relative was missing.

The quake displaced 8,000 families in Matanao, of whom 3,000 have either partially damaged or totally destroyed homes, according to Mayor Vincent Fernandez. 

He said some 13,000 relief packs to be distributed to quake survivors today might only last them a week.

Fernandez appealed for donations of food, tents and water.

Sunday’s magnitude 6.9 quake struck south of President Duterte’s hometown Davao City, cracking thousands of structures across the region that withstood a previous series of quakes. 

The Davao region has been hit by at least three powerful earthquakes in recent months, causing several deaths and scores of injuries and badly damaging houses, town halls, hotels, malls and hospitals.

Some of the towns badly hit by the previous quakes are still under a state of calamity when last Sunday’s tremor struck.

On the other hand, the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology (Phivolcs) said last Sunday’s tremor will not trigger volcanic eruptions and tsunamis in the region.

Phivolcs made the clarification as strong aftershocks continued to rattle parts of Mindanao yesterday.

Phivolcs said the epicenter of the earthquake was inland and that the fault that caused the powerful tremor is not capable of generating a tsunami.

A tsunami could be sourced from the movement of the Cotabato Trench, located west of Davao region, or the Philippine Trench located east, or other offshore active faults. 

The magnitude 6.9 event and succeeding earthquakes were tectonic in origin, the agency added. Tectonic quakes happen when rocks in the earth’s crust break due to geological forces created by movement of tectonic plates.

This developed as a magnitude 4.6 quake struck six kilometers southwest of Magsaysay, Davao del Sur at 2:07 p.m. yesterday.

It was felt at Intensity 5 classified as strong in Hagonoy, Davao del Sur; Intensity 4 in Davao City and Intensity 3 in Kidapawan City.

A magnitude 3.4 quake also hit some 26 km southwest of Padada at 12:55 p.m.

It was felt at Intensity 4 in Padada and Intensity 3 in Digos City.  – Helen Flores, Sheila Crisostomo, John Unson, Janvic Mateo, Evelyn Macairan