A woman on a stretcher is assisted by a companion after a powerful earthquake was felt in Davao City on Tuesda. (AP)
MAKILALA, COTABATO––Two powerful earthquakes hours apart shook a large part of Mindanao, killing six people and injuring dozens in a region still reeling from a previous deadly tremor.
A 6.6 magnitude tremor struck 22 kilometers southeast of the landlocked town of Tulunan in Cotabato at 9:04 a.m. Tuesday. It was followed close to two hours after by a 6.1 magnitude quake that centered 17 kilometers southeast of Tulunan.
Terrified locals ran into the streets after the first quake, which hit the island of Mindanao as schools and offices opened for the day.
The shaking lasted up to a minute in some areas, damaging homes, multi-story buildings and classrooms in a region where hundreds are still displaced by a quake that killed at least five earlier this month.
In Barangay Lanao Kuran in Arakan town, two persons died and another was wounded after they were run over by rolling rocks.
Arakan Municipal Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Officer Weng Gafate said the wounded victim is a two-year-old boy who was immediately rushed to a hospital.
Gafate identified one of the dead victims as Angel Andy, 22, and his seven-year-old son. The two-year-old boy is also Andy’s son.
In Tulunan town, the quake’s epicenter, Mayor Reuel Limbugan said one person who died was identified as Marichel Morla of Barangay Banayal.
Three pupils were also slightly wounded in Tulunan’s Daig Elementary School as debris from a damaged school building fell on them.
Cotabato Schools Division Superintendent Omar Obas said the pupils were now in stable condition.
In Digos City, Mayor Josef Cagas identified one person who died as Jeremy.
In Koronadal City, a retired ambulance driver for a government hospital, Nestor Narciso, 56, died when a concrete wall of the Koronadal City Alliance Church collapsed.
In Magsaysay, Davao del Sur, a 15-year-old Grade 9 student died in a hospital in Bansalan town after he was hit by falling debris from a damaged school building, said Anthony Allada, the town’s information officer.
Authorities identified the victim as Jessie Riel Parba, a student of Kasuga National High School.
“Buildings were not just moving, they were swaying,” Gadi Sorilla, a doctor at a hospital in Tulunan, a town about 25 kilometers from the epicentre told AFP.
“I asked God for help,” he said, adding the hospital had quickly received about 10 patients, some with head injuries.
Limbungan said the local municipal hall of Tulunan had been heavily damaged and authorities had received “lots of reports of injuries”.
Rescue teams worked until dark on Tuesday to assess the damage to the region, where electricity and phone services were knocked out in some areas by the power of the quake.
The continuing tremors were causing anxiety on the ground, with people refusing to go back inside buildings for fear of being caught in any resulting collapse.
Schools across the area have been shuttered as a precaution.
The area is still suffering the effects of a 6.4-magnitude quake that hit less than two weeks ago, killing at least five people and damaging dozens of buildings.
Residents fled homes across the Mindanao region and a mall caught fire in the city of General Santos shortly after the quake struck on October 16.
“We still have 570 individuals in evacuation centers (from the previous quake) and with this quake, we are expecting more evacuees,” said Zaldy Ortiz, an officer with a local emergency rescue team.
One of the deadliest quakes to hit the Philippines recently was in April, when 16 people were killed as a building near the capital Manila collapsed and the secondary Clark airport was shut down due to damage to the passenger terminal.
High-rise structures in the capital swayed after the April quake, leaving some with large cracks in their walls. /lzb/dam