MANILA (Reuters) – At least 15 people were feared dead in the southern Philippines on Monday after a powerful magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck off the island of Mindanao, triggering tsunami warnings across several countries.
The quake came early in the morning as schools were reopening in the Philippines after a long break, with the tremors felt strongly in a dozen provinces and 420 km (261 miles) away in the city of Manado on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi.
Tsunami alerts were issued in the southern Philippines, northern Indonesia and the Malaysian state of Sabah on Borneo island after the quake with an epicentre located about 20 km (12.4 miles) off Mindanao’s Sarangani province.
Philippine authorities were assessing the damage from the quake, with the office of civil defence seeking to verifying initial reports that 15 people had been killed and 129 injured in the region, mostly from falling debris.
President Ferdinand Marcos Jr ordered an immediate disaster response in Mindanao, an island the size of South Korea, with agencies directed to prepare relief supplies and evacuation centres and be ready for possible rescue operations.
“The national government is moving and we will not leave Mindanao behind,” he said in a statement.
It comes eight months after the Philippines suffered its deadliest tremor in 12 years, when a shallow 6.9 magnitude quake hit off the island of Cebu, killing 79 people. Two powerful quakes struck Mindanao two weeks later, the strongest at a magnitude 7.4.
The Philippines and Indonesia experience hundreds of quakes each year and sit on tectonically complex parts of the “Pacific Ring of Fire”, a seismically active belt stretching from South America to the Russian Far East.
The Philippine seismology agency said at least nine strong aftershocks were felt across Mindanao on Monday morning, the highest at a magnitude 6.7.
The full extent of the damage was not yet clear and authorities said assessments were underway.
Video shared by the local government in General Santos, a city of about 700,000 people, showed the collapse of a building housing a fast food restaurant, with panicked onlookers fleeing as a cloud of dust spread quickly through the air.
One General Santos hospital was evacuated due to concerns about cracks on higher floors, while one of the buildings at the city’s Notre Dame of Dadiangas University collapsed, but no one was inside.
