Hubby was listening to CNN tonight when suddenly the news came on. The Southern Philippines was hit by a 6.5 intensity quake. I was online so I immediately went to the sites of CNN, ABS-CBN, GMANews and Inquirer. Nothing. I opened the radio and tuned in. Nothing. It seems the news was just so raw that it was still taking time to hit the news wires.
I first texted a Jesuit priest friend who was from Mindanao, Next, I remembered Cathy, my blogger friend, whose family I knew was from Mindanao. My Mom’s side still has family in Davao City too.
Hoping against hope that Cathy was online, I logged on to my email client. Thank goodness she was! For the next several minutes, we both IM’d each other and scoured the internet looking for any news at all. I saw a news bit on the Post Chronicle while she, with her wide news resources, pointed me to the U.S. Geological Service (USGS) website. The first local paper to pick up the news several minutes later was the Inquirer.
Being the journalist that Cathy is, she instinctively thought of blogging about this breaking news.
For me, the news brought back a wave of deja vu as I recalled the July 16, 1990 earthquake that hit Manila. We only had our 2 daughters then and they were just 2 and 3 years old. My boss asked me to go to the 15th floor of the then PDCP Bldg (that is the building now beside the SGV Bldg on Ayala Ave.) as some people had IT questions that needed to be resolved.
I was not even there half an hour when the whole building began shaking. First sideways, then up and down, violently. The floor’s security guard was already praying aloud. Power was cut off and we were in absolute darkness. After the shaking, I opened the emergency exit but the stairs were along the side of the building and I was afraid that if an aftershock came, we could get injured making our way down that way.
We ended up inching our way down the building’s stairwell, meeting other scared people along the way, till we got back down to tierra firma.
My husband, thankfully, was in the same building, attending a meeting. We found each other and immediately went home. We met so many people walking in a daze throughout the streets of Makati and elsewhere. It was with a thankful heart that we got home to find our 2 girls safe with their nannies.
Days later, the damage that this earthquake wrought became clearer as we heard of some Baguio buildings coming down, including the Hyatt Terraces Hotel where we had gone for our honeymoon. Many other places in Luzon were damaged likewise. It was a never-to-be-forgotten quake.
Cathy and I closed our chat by agreeing to pray for the safety of all those affected in Mindanao. But as she reminded me, this is already nature calling out for us to take immediate, active steps towards protecting Mother Nature and preventing anymore of the greenhouse effect. Indeed, no one should fail to watch “The Inconvenient Truth” of Al Gore. We only have one planet and it’s time to save it.
(photo courtesy of USGS)