The village was meant to be a place of safety: 200 “disaster-resilient homes” for survivors of a devastating 2013 typhoon, paid for by a charity and built to withstand ferocious winds.
But now it is one of the deadliest sites in another natural disaster, a 6.9-magnitude earthquake late Tuesday centered in Cebu Province in the Philippines. By Wednesday, 69 deaths had been confirmed as rescue workers dug through rubble, searching for dozens of people who were still missing.
Wilson Ramos, an emergency worker with a local response unit, said the quake had killed at least 10 people in the SM Cares Village, established just over a decade ago for survivors of Super Typhoon Haiyan, which killed more than 6,000 people in the Philippines.
“This area was built to safeguard storm survivors and people from high-risk zones,” Mr. Ramos said. “I cannot yet say whether those who died were also Haiyan survivors; more than 10 years have passed. But this village was intended to give them a new home.”
The quake was the deadliest in the Philippines since 2013.
Cebu’s governor, Pamela Baricuatro, put the entire province, in the central Philippines, under a state of emergency. Bernardo Rafaelito Alejandro, a deputy administrator for the civil defense office, said at a news briefing that the response efforts were focused on the northern tip of Cebu’s main island, including Bogo City, where the SM Cares Village was established in 2014.
“Right now, the priority is search and rescue,” Mr. Alejandro said.
Besides survivors of Haiyan, which was known in the Philippines as Super Typhoon Yolanda, the SM Cares Village was meant to house residents who had moved away from coastal danger zones.
Mikee Empaces, an executive secretary in the governor’s office, said that ceilings in the SM Cares Village homes collapsed when the quake struck.
“Some families were completely gone, and in other cases several members of one family died,” said Jeany Ynot, the chief of Bogo City’s disaster unit.
The village was established by SM Cares, the social arm of one of the Philippines’ largest corporations. It did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment on Wednesday evening.
Elsewhere, many people were buried under soil and boulders in a landslide caused by the quake, Ms. Ynot said in an interview. One village in a mountainous area, Binabag, was hit especially badly, she said.
Mr. Alejandro, the civil defense official, said his office had asked for additional workers for the Bogo City district hospital, which he said had been overwhelmed by patients.
Officials said infrastructure damage in the area was widespread, with at least 11 bridges impassable; key roads blocked by landslides; and government buildings, including Bogo City Hall, a municipal hall in another town and a sports complex, either collapsed or partly destroyed.
Ms. Empaces said that two or three hospitals had been rendered unusable and that power and communications were down in at least three municipalities.
Mr. Alejandro said public works personnel were being sent to Cebu to inspect buildings and had been told to prioritize hospitals, schools and roads. In Bogo City alone, Mr. Alejandro said, about 1,000 residents have been forced to stay in open spaces until their homes are deemed safe.
“We have to restore power immediately, and we have to ensure the integrity of structures,” Mr. Alejandro said.
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