Philippines earthquake: Major 6.9m tremor kills at least 72 and injures more than 200

A firefighter and a child are among the 72 people killed so far by an earthquake measuring 6.9 on the Richter Scale in the Philippines.

Rescuers used backhoes and sniffer dogs to look for survivors in collapsed houses and other damaged buildings in the central Philippines after an earthquake killed at least 72 people and injured more than 200 others.

The earthquake caused buildings to violently shake as authorities issue an urgent warning to people living near the coast at about 10 p.m. local time Tuesday, September 30. The city of Bogo and outlying rural towns in Cebu province were hit hard and a number of residents were trapped. Sporadic rain and damaged bridges and roads have hampered the race to save lives.

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On Wednesday night, rescuers in orange and yellow hard hats used spotlights, a backhoe and bare hands to sift through the rubble of concrete slabs, broken wood and twisted iron bars for hours in a collapsed building in Bogo city. No survivor was found.

“We’re still in the golden hour of our search and rescue,” Office of Civil Defense deputy administrator Bernardo Rafaelito Alejandro IV said in a Wednesday morning news briefing in Manila, the country’s capital. “There are still many reports of people who were pinned or hit by debris.”

The earthquake occurred at a dangerously shallow depth of 5 kilometers (3 miles) and was centered about 19 kilometers (12 miles) northeast of Bogo, a coastal city of about 90,000 people in Cebu province where officials reported about half of the known deaths.

Deaths also were reported from the outlying towns of Medellin and San Remigio, where three coast guard personnel, a firefighter and a child were killed separately by collapsing walls and falling debris while trying to flee to safety from a basketball game in a sports complex that was disrupted by the quake, town officials said.

The Philippine government is considering whether to seek help from foreign governments based on an ongoing rapid damage assessment, Alejandro said.

The Philippines is located in the Ring of Fire, one of the most disaster-prone regions in the world. Earthquakes often strike the region which is littered with fault lines.

More than half a million people are believed to have felt very strong shaking across the Visayan Islands, which includes Cebu. The estimates come from US Geological Survey models.