“We are receiving additional numbers of reported casualties so this thing is very fluid. We are receiving reports (that) as high as 60 individuals are reported to have perished in this earthquake,” Rafaelito Alejandro, deputy administrator of the government’s Office of Civil Defence, initially told reporters in Manila.
This figure was later updated to 69.
According to the US Geological Survey (USGS), the shallow 6.9-magnitude earthquake struck off Bogo, a city of 90,000 near the northern tip of the populous island of Cebu at 9.59pm Tuesday, collapsing buildings and tearing up roads.
The government’s National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council previously listed 26 deaths and 147 injuries as of early Wednesday, with 22 buildings damaged. It gave no breakdown.
Deaths were earlier reported by local rescuers in Bogo, as well as in the nearby municipality of San Remigio.
Dramatic footage filmed by residents and widely shared on social media showed an old Catholic church in Bantayan island near Cebu adorned with a string of light bulbs swaying wildly shortly before its belfry tumbled onto the courtyard.
Local television showed riders being forced to dismount from their motorcycles and hold onto the railings for dear life as a Cebu bridge violently rocked.
The Cebu provincial government has put out a call on its official Facebook page for medical volunteers to assist in the aftermath of the quake.
“There could be people trapped beneath collapsed buildings,” provincial rescue official Wilson Ramos told Agence France-Presse (AFP), citing rescue efforts underway in San Remigio and Bogo.
Overnight recovery efforts were hampered by the dark as well as aftershocks, he added.
The rescue effort proceeded all night even as the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology said the region was being rocked by 379 aftershocks.
The quake caused power lines to trip, leading to outages across Cebu and nearby central islands, though power was restored shortly after midnight in Cebu and four other major central islands, the National Grid Corp of the Philippines said in an updated advisory.
Cebu firefighter Joey Leeguid told AFP from San Fernando town: “We felt the shake here in our station, it was so strong. We saw our locker moving from left to right, we felt slightly dizzy for a while but we are all fine now.”
‘In shock’
Martham Pacilan, 25, told AFP he was at the Bantayan town square near the church when its belfry collapsed.
“I heard a loud booming noise from the direction of the church then I saw rocks falling from the structure. Luckily no one got hurt,” he told the news agency.
“I was in shock and in panic at the same time but my body couldn’t move, I was just there waiting for the shake to stop.”
Agnes Merza, a carer also based in Bantayan, said her kitchen tiles had cracked.
“It felt as though we would all fall down. It’s the first time I have experienced it. The neighbours all ran out of their homes. My two teenage assistants hid under a table because that’s what they were taught in the boy scouts,” the 65-year-old told AFP.
The Cebu provincial government reported a commercial building and a school in Bantayan had collapsed, while a fast food restaurant in Bogo was heavily damaged.
A number of village roads also sustained damage.
In a live video message on her official Facebook account, Cebu provincial governor Pamela Baricuatro urged residents to “stay calm and move to open areas; keep away from walls or structures that may collapse and stay alert for aftershocks.”
The USGS had reported a magnitude reading of 7.0, before revising it down, while the Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre said there was no tsunami threat from the earthquake.
Quakes are a near-daily occurrence in the Philippines, which is situated on the Pacific “Ring of Fire”, an arc of intense seismic activity stretching from Japan through Southeast Asia and across the Pacific basin.
Most are too weak to be felt by humans, but strong and destructive ones come at random, with no technology available to predict when and where they might strike.