The quakes collapsed houses fabricated from stone and wood, waking residents from their sleep, said Roldan Esdicul, who heads the disaster response office in Batanes province. The footage shows people clearing stone bricks the scale of boulders to tug one body out from under the rubble of the home.
“Our bed and everything was swinging side to side like a hammock,” Esdicul said by cellphone from the provincial capital of Basco. “We all ran to safety.”
More than 1,000 residents of hard-hit Itbayat Island – almost half the island’s population of mostly fishermen – were advised to not return to their homes and stay within the town square as further aftershocks rocked the region, he added.
“The injured are still being brought in,” Itbayat mayor Raul de Sagon told an area radio station. He said more doctors could also be needed if the variety of injured in inland villages increases.
The Philippine seismological agency said the quakes had magnitudes of 5.4 and 5.9 on the Richter scale. The third quake, with a magnitude of 5.7, occurred on Saturday.
Esdicul said he was already in his office on the provincial governor’s office when a second, more powerful earthquake struck about three hours after the primary tremor. “We must hold on because you possibly can’t stand or walk. It was so powerful,” he said.
The initial quake severely damaged the bell tower of the island’s old limestone church, the Nineteenth-century Santa Maria de Mayan, a well-liked tourist attraction. The tower collapsed when the second quake hit the island, he added.
A hospital in Itbayat was damaged, causing patients to be evacuated and carried outside together with dozens of injured earthquake victims. Some of them were later crowded right into a covered basketball court because of heavy rains, Esdicul said.
He added that seven of the injured, who suffered serious fractures, were airlifted from Itbayat to a bigger provincial hospital.
Itbayat, a part of the northernmost Batanes islands, has a population of about 2,800 and lies on the Luzon Strait, which separates the Philippines and Taiwan. The islands are famous for his or her tiny, ancestral stone houses with coral partitions and cogon grass roofs, and are sometimes suffering from seasonal typhoons.
As the quake shook Batanes, 1000’s of residents conducted pre-dawn earthquake drills about 250 kilometers (250 kilometers) south, near metropolitan Manila, which was unaffected by the quake. Some journalists questioned why the drill needed to happen so early within the morning, said Renato Solidum, a outstanding seismologist and disaster response expert who helped lead it.
Solidum said that when an earthquake hit Batanes shortly thereafter, it helped officials emphasize the incontrovertible fact that disaster could strike at any time.
One of the world’s most disaster-prone countries, the Philippines is characterised by frequent earthquakes and volcanic eruptions since it lies on the so-called Pacific Ring of Fire, a seismically lively arc of volcanoes and fault lines within the Pacific Basin. In 1990, a 7.7-magnitude quake within the northern Philippines killed almost 2,000 people.
