Three months after the devastating magnitude 7.8 earthquake of June 8 Southern Mindanao was shaken awake again.
On Tuesday evening Sept. 1 another earthquake struck offshore near Balut Island. Initially reported at magnitude 6.0 and later revised by PHIVOLCS to magnitude 5.4 it caused no damage. Its deep offshore origin spared communities from another catastrophe.
Yet for those who lived through June 8 the body remembers before the mind can reason.
The moment the ground begins to move conversations stop. Eyes search for exits. People instinctively rush outdoors. A low rumble beneath the floor can bring back the sound of cracking concrete falling objects and those terrible seconds when nobody knew whether the shaking would stop.
That is what people who have not experienced an earthquake often fail to understand: the earthquake may end, but its afterlife remains.
The September 1 tremor came less than a month after another offshore earthquake near Balut Island. Perhaps this is nature’s brutal reminder: tectonic plates do not observe anniversaries. Faults do not care whether communities have recovered.
The earth moves according to forces beneath our feet that neither politicians nor press conferences can control.
Southern Mindanao sits in one of the country’s complex tectonic environments, shaped by the movements beneath the Cotabato trench and surrounding fault systems. The September 1 quake was tectonic. Occurred deep beneath the seabed. Its depth and offshore location spared us destruction.
We should not confuse good fortune with safety.
That would be another equivalence.
The June 8 magnitude 7.8 earthquake was not another entry in a geological record. It tore through communities. Permanently altered lives. It is like an earthquake that refuses to leave. Yet.
In its aftermath we counted the dead, the missing, the injured, the displaced, the damaged homes and destroyed livelihoods. Government reports measured the catastrophe in numbers.
Numbers are an inadequate language for grief.
Behind every statistic was someone who did not come home. A father who left for work. A mother in Gen. Santos City who spent the night outdoors beside her children because the walls of their house could no longer be trusted.
A family in Sarangani Province still staring at the ruins of what had taken them a lifetime to build. A condominium unit owner wondering who bears the cost of the crack walls and beams.
The physical shaking lasted minutes. The rebuilding will take years. The trauma may take longer.
Perhaps the greatest danger after every disaster is not the earthquake. It is our amnesia.
The pattern is painfully familiar. Disaster strikes. Officials arrive. Cameras follow. Relief goods are distributed. Promises are made. Emergency meetings are convened.
Then the cameras leave. The headlines move on.
Survivors are left with cracked walls, unpaid loans, disrupted livelihoods and bureaucratic forms that somehow multiply faster than assistance.
We Filipinos are repeatedly praised for being “resilient”. Resilience can become a beautiful word used to hide an ugly failure.
Why must people constantly be resilient in the first place?
There is a difference between honoring the courage of our people and using that courage as an excuse for state incompetence.
We should celebrate resilience. We should never institutionalize suffering.
The June 8 earthquake again exposed a glaring weakness in our disaster preparedness system: evacuation remains largely improvised.
When disaster strikes people are herded into schools, gymnasiums and basketball courts—not because these were designed as evacuation centers but simply because they happen to have roofs.
That is not preparedness. That is desperation with a government seal.
Republic Act No. 12076, The Ligtas Pinoy Centers Act, recognizes the need for properly designed evacuation centers. It must not remain another intentioned law gathering dust.
Every municipality those in high-risk areas must have structurally sound and properly equipped evacuation facilities—with water, sanitation, electricity, medical services and adequate spaces for displaced families.
Disaster survivors are not refugees who should simply be grateful for a patch of floor. They are citizens. They have rights.
The same urgency must apply to inspections. After an earthquake officials are quick to assure the public that buildings are being checked.
Good. But, inspection must mean more than a ceremonial visit and a reassuring statement.
The public has the right to know which schools, hospitals, bridges and public buildings remain safe—and which require retrofitting or closure.
There must be no pressure to soften inspection results to protect businesses, property values or political interests.
Concrete does not understand loyalty. A compromised column will collapse whether its owner is rich, influential or politically connected.
The truth must be told before the next earthquake tells it for us.
The September 1 tremor should not cause panic. Neither should it encourage complacency. We were fortunate. Gratitude is not preparedness.
The real test is what government does during the intervals between earthquakes.
Do we retrofit schools? Strictly enforce building standards? Build evacuation centers? Identify structures before they collapse? Make calamity funds immediately accessible to communities?
Do we simply wait for the next catastrophe and begin again the familiar ritual of emergency declarations, relief operations and promises?
Earthquakes cannot be prevented. Disasters are not entirely natural.
When constructed buildings collapse, when people are forced into unsafe evacuation centers, when assistance arrives late because of bureaucratic bottlenecks, when safety standards are ignored—those are no longer simply acts of nature.
Those are failures of governance. This brings us back to the false equivalences that increasingly dominate our national discourse.
While Southern Mindanao continues to recover and trembles anew at every seismic event the nations political establishment remains consumed by its own manufactured earthquakes.
Political quarrels are presented as emergencies. Personal ambitions are dressed up as principles. Endless political drama consumes attention while real emergencies unfold outside the air-conditioned halls of power.
A family whose home has been condemned does not care who won the political skirmish.
A farmer whose livelihood was destroyed cannot eat rhetoric.
A child attending classes in a compromised school will not be saved by another televised political speech.
Politics matters, of course. It determines who controls resources and whose interests’ government protects.
There is something profoundly obscene about the political class consuming so much public attention with its endless dramas while ordinary Filipinos confront dangers that are immediate, physical and unforgiving.
Politicians can survive a press conference. A family trapped beneath a collapsed building cannot. That is the difference.
The ground still moves
The September 1 earthquake caused no tsunami and no major reported damage. For that we are thankful.
But it reminded us that the June 8 earthquake was not the end of the story.
Neither was the August tremor. Neither perhaps will be the September quake.
The earth beneath Southern Philippines continues its movement.
So must our preparations.
We cannot command plates to stop shifting. We cannot negotiate with a fault line. We cannot suspend the laws of geology through parliamentary maneuvering.
But, we can prepare. We can build better. We can inspect honestly.
We can honestly and seriously enforce laws.
We can stop treating disaster preparedness as a government project activated only when television cameras arrive.
Southern Mindanao has survived. Again. But survival should not be the standard by which government measures success.
The standard must be whether fewer people die or injured. Whether fewer homes collapse. Whether children are safer in their schools. Whether families have somewhere dignified to go.
The ground beneath us is still moving.
The question is whether those who govern us are finally willing to move with the urgency that reality demands.
Because the next earthquake will not wait for another crisis, another committee hearing or another government press conference.
When the earth moves it exposes everything—the weakness of our buildings, the gaps in our preparedness, the abject poverty of our communities and ultimately the cracks, in our governance.
Unlike politicians earthquakes do not engage in false equivalences.
They simply reveal the truth. (davaotoday.com)
