Some families have been provided with modular tents to live in.
Manila:
Anxious residents slept outside after hundreds of aftershocks rocked the quake-hit northern Philippines, locals said on Thursday, as President Ferdinand Marcos Jr inspected the damage in the area.
Five people were killed and more than 150 injured when a magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck Wednesday morning, authorities said.
The strong earthquake hit the mountainous region, toppling buildings, triggering landslides and shaking tall towers hundreds of kilometers away in the capital Manila.
Reggi Tolentino, a restaurant owner in Bangued province, said: “The aftershocks have happened every 20 minutes, 15 minutes since yesterday.
“Many people slept outside last night, almost every family.”
Some families have been provided with modular tents to live in. Marcos Jr has urged people to wait for their homes to be inspected before moving in.
Hundreds of buildings were damaged or destroyed, roads were blocked by landslides, and power was cut off in the affected areas.
But in Abra, which suffered the full force of the quake, the overall damage was “very minor,” police chief Maly Cula told AFP.
“We don’t have a lot of people in evacuation sites, although many are on the streets because of the aftershocks,” Cula said.
“Abra is back to normal.”
Marcos Jr, who took office last month, traveled to Bangued on Thursday to inspect the damage and discuss the response effort with government, military and disaster officials.
The local seismological agency said more than 800 aftershocks have been recorded since the quake struck, 24 of which were strong enough to be felt.
The aftershocks are expected to continue for “several weeks,” Renato Solidum, director of the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology, told a briefing led by Marcos Jr. chair.
“There will be a lot” for the first three days, he said, then “hopefully it will fade”.
Tourist operators hit
In the city of Vigan, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and tourist attraction in the province of Ilocos Sur, centuries-old structures built during the Spanish colonial era have been damaged.
Governor Jeremias Singson told Teleradyo television that 460 buildings in the province had been affected, including the Bantay Bell Tower, which partially collapsed.
“Our tourism industry and small business owners have been really affected,” Singson said.
After visiting Vigan on Thursday, Sen. Imee Marcos, the president’s sister, said the damage to old churches in the city was “outrageous”.
The Philippines is frequently rocked by earthquakes due to its location on the Pacific “Ring of Fire”, an arc of intense seismic activity that stretches from Japan through Southeast Asia and across the Pacific basin. .
Wednesday’s quake was one of the strongest recorded in the Philippines in recent years and was felt across the marshy areas of Luzon island, the most populous in the archipelago.
In October 2013, a 7.1 magnitude earthquake hit Bohol Island in the central Philippines, killing more than 200 people and triggering landslides.
The ancient churches in the birthplace of Catholicism in the Philippines were badly damaged. Nearly 400,000 people were displaced and tens of thousands of homes were damaged.
The strong earthquake altered the island’s landscape, and a “ground fault” pushed up a strip of land about three meters, creating a rock wall above the epicenter.
In 1990, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake in the northern Philippines created a fault in the ground extending over a hundred kilometers.
The death toll is estimated at more than 1,200, with major damage being buildings in Manila.
(Except for the title, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from an aggregated feed.)
