Bogo: Rescuers used backhoes and sniffer dogs to look for survivors in collapsed houses and other damaged buildings in the central Philippines on Wednesday, a day after an earthquake killed at least 69 people and injured more than 200 others.
The death toll was expected to rise from the 6.9 magnitude quake that hit at about 10 p.m. on Tuesday and trapped an unspecified number of residents in the hard-hit city of Bogo and outlying rural towns in Cebu province.
Sporadic rain and damaged bridges and roads have hampered the race to save lives, officials said.
On Wednesday night, rescuers in orange and yellow hard hats used spotlights, a backhoe and bare hands to sift through the rubble of concrete slabs, broken wood and twisted iron bars for hours in a collapsed building in Bogo city. No survivor was found.
“We’re still in the golden hour of our search and rescue,” Office of Civil Defence deputy administrator Bernardo Rafaelito Alejandro IV said in a morning news briefing in Manila, the country’s capital. “There are still many reports of people who were pinned or hit by debris.”
The epicentre of the earthquake, which was set off by movement in an undersea fault line at a dangerously shallow depth of 5 kilometres (3 miles), was about 19 kilometres (12 miles) northeast of Bogo, a coastal city of about 90,000 people in Cebu province, where about half of the deaths were reported, officials said.
The Philippine government is considering whether to seek help from foreign governments based on an ongoing rapid damage assessment, Alejandro said.