“ Calamity state ” As the earthquake kills 69 in the province of the Philippines

At least 69 people were killed and dozens injured after a powerful 6.9 magnitude earthquake hit the central Philippines late Tuesday.

The province of Cebu, which underwent the weight of damage, said a state of calamity on Wednesday, after thousands spent the night in the streets in the middle of the repeated aftershocks.

A CEBU resident told the BBC that he was among them, adding that electric and water supplies had been cut. He says that the voices of the crying children could be heard around him, adding that they were “traumatized”.

The earthquake occurs just over a week after the country was struck by consecutive typhoons that have killed more than a dozen people.

Most of the victims were from Bogo City, a small town in one of the largest islands in the Visayas Islands, the central region of the Philippines – and the place closest to the epicenter of the earthquake.

Images coming out of Bogo show corpses bags bordered in the street and hundreds treated in tent hospitals. The officials warned against “a lot of damage” caused by earthquakes.

Local authorities have called on volunteers with medical experience to help cope with injuries.

Curlled and cracked roads and fallen bridges also make it difficult access to emergency services. The electric lines in many places are down, which means that it was also difficult to speak to affected people.

Seven of those who died in Tuesday’s earthquake in Bogo had lived in a village built for victims of Typhoon Haiyan, who struck the Center Philippines 12 years ago, killing more than 6,000 people.

In the municipality of San Remigio, a basketball match was underway when the earthquake hit, an emergency intervention manager at the BBC told. Nearly 20 people in the match were sent to the hospital and at least one person died later.

National Police and Fire Bureau officials claim that they favor research and rescue operations, rushing to restore electricity and providing emergency supplies to affected people.

On Wednesday evening, Bogo was struck by another replica, this one of 4.7, with tremors felt in the city of Cebu and the neighboring islands of Leyte. There was no known victim.

The Archbishop of Cebu told the faithful to stay far from the churches, pending structural assessments. This call is important because Cebu was one of the first Philippine Islands to be colonized by Spain in the 1500s and houses many old churches.

Previous images have shown the tower of an old Catholic church swinging, then in part in a single locality.

The Philippines are made up of thousands of islands and the National Disaster Agency based in the capital Manila is responsible for publishing official figures for typhoons and earthquakes.

However, the number is generally slow because the figures are subject to rigorous checks – and it is therefore possible that the number of deaths can quickly increase.

The Philippines are very vulnerable to natural disasters. It is located on the geologically unstable “fire ring” – so called due to the high number of earthquakes and volcanoes that occur here.

The upper layers of the Earth in the vast Pacific region are divided into sections – tectonic plates – which move all compared to the other.

The country of the Southeast Asian island is also on the way to typhoons that sweep the Pacific Ocean each year.

More than a dozen people were killed after Tropical Storm Bualoi and the Typhoon Ragasa hit the Philippines earlier last month. Hundreds of thousands of people have been evacuated and a handful remains missing.