THE OTHER day, we came across a post on Facebook by the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology (PhiVolcS) detailing the various fault lines that crisscross Davao City. The agency’s post also provided a map of the city and the barangays affected directly by the faults.
Yesterday, shortly after 9 in the morning, while waiting for our son to finish the job we asked him to do for us, we decided to scan our mobile phone to check which particular fault line includes our rural residence. But even before we were able to retrieve the PhiVolCS post, we felt that there was a gradual, slight movement on the ground where our feet were anchored on. Then came the stronger ground movement. Next, we saw our parked vehicle seemingly rocking and swaying by some invisible hands.
Then we saw our sala set, our refrigerators, and the chandelier hung on the ceiling moving side by side unusually faster. Our woman of the house, who was sweeping the floor of our kitchen, suddenly hurried out with her hands holding on to any object she had touched while trying her way.
Then our other son, who was at the other side of the house’s compound, shouted to her mother to stay put by the door and wait for him to guide her out.
We have to keep ourselves standing or seated for a while until the shaking of the earth subsided. It was then that we got back inside the house to check whether the relatively strong tremor caused any damage to any of our properties inside. Thank God there was none. It was only our Internet connection that went kaput for roughly 15 minutes before it was restored.
From that time onwards, we kept on monitoring from the mainstream media as well as from the social media platforms to keep ourselves posted on the development of the 7.4 magnitude quake with reported epicenter in the Philippine Trench fronting Manay in Davao Oriental.
As of the writing of this piece, we have yet to see or hear reports of actual damages brought about by the earthquake.
It was a good thing the epicenter is a bit far from the more developed and heavily populated Davao City. Had the epicenter been in the seabed nearer the leading Southern Mindanao metropolis, the damage of that 7.6 magnitude earthquake would have been unimaginable.
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We would not be surprised if, any time soon, the Department of Education will again be mandating school heads, especially of public schools, to order the students to again bring hard hats with them.
Yes, we can still remember when former president Rodrigo R. Duterte was still the chief executive, a relatively stronger earthquake hit the Davao and South Cotabato-General Santos City-Sarangani regions. The temblor resulted in the disturbance of classes and offices. The Department of Education (DepEd) mandated that each student bring a hard hat to school.
The purpose was, of course, noteworthy considering that the hard hat is supposed to protect the students’ heads should an earthquake happen during classes.
The DepEd mandate was immediately complied with by the students, as parents are afraid that some head injuries may be caused by the unpredictable temblor.
Our daughter has to comply with the order despite the relatively costly hard hat; our daughter could not do anything, as the safety of her two children (our grandchildren), who were then still in high school.
With the order, some enterprising businessmen were quick to offer the supply of the hard hats to the DepEd.
And we can only imagine how much the hard hat supplier could have earned from the transaction, considering the number of students in both the Davao Region and Region XII.
But after those two or three successive earthquakes in the part of Mindanao we have earlier mentioned, there was a lull in the occurrence of such natural phenomena. The hard hat purchased by the students’ parents could now hardly be found in the house. Some of the protective gadgets may still be kept for memory.
However, many, if not all, of those who acquired the hard hats to comply with the DepEd’s mandate could not even remember where they had stored the protective hard hats.
Maybe with what happened recently, there is a great possibility that some ranking education officials may again resurrect the order “for the protection of the students during earthquake incidence.”
