A magnitude 6.6 earthquake struck the Philippines on Tuesday, killing at least one person and damaging roads and buildings including a hospital and a sports complex being used as a novel coronavirus quarantine centre.
It was the strongest earthquake in eight months in the Philippines, which lies on the “Ring of Fire,” a seismically active belt of volcanoes circling the Pacific Ocean.
“My things at home fell down and my neighbours’ walls cracked and some collapsed,” Rodrigo Gonhuran, 30, told Reuters from the central town of Cataingan, which has a population of more than 50,000 people and is near the epicentre.
One man, a retired police colonel, was killed when his three-storey house collapsed, while four people suffered minor injuries, provincial administrator Rino Revalo told DZMM radio station.
Patients were moved out of a hospital into tents because of cracks in the building, Revalo said.
Engineers were checking a damaged sports complex to see if it was safe to accommodate people staying there in quarantine after moving back from the capital, Manila, he said.
People returning to their homes in the provinces from the capital have to spend time in quarantine.
The Philippines, which has a population of 107 million, has the most coronavirus cases in Southeast Asia with more than 164,000 confirmed infections and 2,681 deaths.
The quake struck at sea at a depth of 30 km (18.64 miles), the European Mediterranean Seismological Centre said.
The Philippine seismology agency said there was no risk of a tsunami but warned of aftershocks.
The Philippines lies in the Pacific “Ring of Fire,” an arc of faults around the Pacific Ocean where most of the world’s earthquakes occur. It’s also lashed by about 20 typhoons and storms each year, making it one of the world’s most disaster-prone countries.
A magnitude 7.7 quake killed nearly 2,000 people in the northern Philippines in 1990.
(Reporting by Rama Venkat in Bengaluru and Neil Jerome Morales in Manila Editing by Ed Davies, Robert Birsel)
—With files from the Associated Press