With disaster officials shouting and school bells ringing, up to 1 million children trooped from class across the Philippines yesterday to test the nation's readiness for a powerful earthquake.
Supervised by Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, students at Santa Elena High School in Marikina City, east of Manila, covered their heads with their hands and ducked under desks before filing to safety outside. Medical teams treated some for mock injuries.
"Should it happen in real life, I think we can manage because of this training," said Jenny Valladores, 13. "If it is really bad, I will pray. I know only God can save me."
Three weeks after at least 5,700 people died in an earthquake in neighboring Indonesia, the Philippine government staged the simultaneous drill at 42,000 schools to streamline evacuation plans and the responsiveness of rescuers.
The Southeast Asian country, in a region of seismic activity known as the "Ring of Fire," is riven with fault lines and has 22 active volcanoes. The last major earthquake, on the main island of Luzon in 1990, killed more than 1,700 people.
"The odds are, in the next several years, we have to prepare for a large one," Defense Secretary Ave-lino Cruz said on Monday.
"We've had the successive earthquakes in Japan and Indonesia. We don't have a scientific method of predicting when it will happen but there is common sense," he said.
Cruz considered the earthquake drill a success but said it must be repeated frequently to make the safety steps automatic.
The exercise also brought together public works officials and engineers to assess the structural integrity of buildings. Cruz said earlier that 60 buildings in Manila alone, including six schools, were found to be unsound and in need of repairs.
A study by the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology showed that 30 percent of government buildings in the capital would collapse in a 7.2 magnitude quake.
Civil defense officials are also preparing for a possible disaster in Sorsogon Province as Mount Bulusan belches ash, damaging crops and raising fears that 50,000 people will have to be evacuated in the event of a big eruption.
RSS