“THE mountain moved.”
“I heard a loud noise, like a helicopter approaching.”
Those one-liners came not from a novelist’s notes but simple folk who were able to use such graphic language even as they stared into the face of the earthquake. The moving mountain frightened a member of the Aeta family in Castillejos, Zambales, epicenter of the earthquake, while the rumble was felt by a community leader in Pampanga, which suffered the brunt of the magnitude 6.1 tremblor last Monday.
In Manila, urban planner Jun Palafox called for an immediate structural audit of public and private buildings, the bad news being that Monday’s shaker isn’t the Big One, which is still to come. Twenty-one hours later, the magnitude 6.5 earthquake that jolted Eastern Samar was diagnosed as having no connection to its predecessor, having originated from a different fault line.
Knowing that we can neither predict nor control a strong earthquake, I don’t want to think about it. My four-year-old Go-bag is as good as useless now, most of its contents having expired. I don’t want to think about replacing them, on the silly assumption that as long as they’re useless, there won’t be any need for them. Mr. Palafox, who must feel like a prophet without honor in his own country, reminds us with a note of urgency in his voice that the Big One could kill 50,000 people in Metro Manila (30,000 from quake injuries, 20,000 from fires) and destroy all seven bridges beginning with Guadalupe.
Check buildings and houses for structural defects, he urged. “Go beyond the Philippine building code” and build for the future, like the next 2,000 years as his firm did in Kathmandu. Can government engineers and regulators imagine A.D. 4019? I don’t want to think about it.
As for those two earthquakes coming one after the other, it’s unnerving to be told that surviving a chain of them doesn’t mean you’re safe from now on. I don’t want to think about it.
