The death toll from a powerful earthquake in the central Philippines rose to 72 on Thursday, officials said, as the search for the missing wound down and rescuers turned their focus to the hundreds injured and thousands left homeless.
The bodies of the three latest victims were pulled from the rubble of a collapsed hotel overnight in the city of Bogo, near the epicentre of the 6.9-magnitude quake that struck on Tuesday.
“We have zero missing, so the assumption is all are accounted for,” National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council spokesman Junie Castillo said, adding that some rescue units in Cebu province had been told to “demobilise”.
President Ferdinand Marcos flew to Bogo with senior aides on Thursday, pledging to put up a “tent city” to temporarily house those whose dwellings were among the 600 wrecked by the quake.
Also to be accommodated there will be the thousands more whose homes remained structurally intact but who fear being caught up in the wave of aftershocks that still sweep the region.
The government said 294 people were injured and around 20,000 had fled their homes across the north of Cebu. Many are sleeping on the streets.
More than 110,000 people in 42 communities affected by the quake will need assistance to rebuild their homes and restore their livelihoods, according to the regional civil defence office.
Marcos told reporters the main impact of the quake had been to infrastructure, with officials unsure about the condition of evacuation centres, which meant “we don’t have anything to house the displaced families”.
“Our decision was to procure giant tents… We will build a tent city that can be put up swiftly and will shield people from rain,” he told reporters, pledging to supply it with food, water and electricity.
He also vowed to restore electricity to Bogo, a city of 90,000, by the end of the day and to provide a token worth 10,000 pesos ($172) to each family that lost their home.
Marcos also visited a partially damaged housing project in Bogo, built for survivors of the 2013 Super Typhoon Haiyan, one of the deadliest natural calamities to hit the Philippines.
Eight bodies were “recovered from collapsed houses” in the project following the quake, a local government statement said.
– ‘I’m still scared’ –
A tiny village chapel in Bogo was serving as a temporary shelter for 18-year-old Diane Madrigal and 14 of her neighbours after their houses were destroyed. Their clothes and food were scattered across the chapel’s pews.
“The entire wall (of my house) fell so I really don’t know how and when we can go back again,” Madrigal told AFP.
“I am still scared of the aftershocks up to now, it feels like we have to run again,” she said.
Mother-of-four Lucille Ipil, 43, added her water container to a 10-metre (30-foot) line along a roadside in Bogo, where residents waited for a truck to bring them water.
“The earthquake really ruined our lives. We cannot eat, drink or bathe properly,” she told AFP.
“We really want to go back to our old life before the quake but we don’t know when that will happen… Rebuilding takes a long time.”
Many areas remain without electricity, and dozens of patients were sheltering in tents outside the damaged Cebu provincial hospital in Bogo.
“I’d rather stay here under this tent. At least I can be treated,” 22-year-old Kyle Malait told AFP as she waited for her dislocated arm to be treated.
Marcos later said government engineers had ascertained that it was safe to move patients back inside the hospital.
Earthquakes 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.
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© Agence France-Presse
