ILOILO — The powerful 6.9-magnitude earthquake that rattled Cebu late Tuesday night and was also strongly felt across Iloilo has laid bare a vulnerability: the province has no earthquake monitoring station of its own.
The deficiency, disaster officials warned, left authorities blind in gauging the true intensity of the tremor locally, prolonging work suspensions at the Iloilo Provincial Capitol and exposing the risks of relying only on “gut feel” and visual checks.
“The absence of a local earthquake monitoring station poses a substantial concern. Without such a facility, we are unable to ascertain whether the seismic event registered as a level 2 or 3 within a 12- or 24-hour period,” said retired Police Colonel Cornelio Salinas, head of the Provincial Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Office (PDRRMO).
“Nga-a indi namon ma-determine ang 12 or 24? Kay wala kita sang earthquake monitoring station. That’s the problem – wala,” he added, stressing that fault lines crisscross Panay Island yet no such facility exists in Iloilo.
Capitol and Casa Real Under Scrutiny
Panay Island lies on the active West Panay Fault — a 90-kilometer fault line cutting through several towns in Iloilo, Antique, Capiz, and Aklan — making the region highly vulnerable to intense seismic activity.
Drone and ground inspections began at dawn Wednesday, October 1, at the provincial capitol and Casa Real. Engineers documented both fresh and worsening cracks in the 25-year-old capitol building, including:
* cracks at joints of masonry and drywall partitions
* cracks on windows, toilets, and floors of the 6th floor
* expanded fissures along the pre-cast moulding at the dome perimeter
At Casa Real, new cracks appeared in restroom walls and tiled corners.
“Sunrise, 5:30 a.m. nag start na kami sang drone operations… May bag-o kita nga cracks,” Salinas said. “We recommended work suspensions because of aftershocks. We are on the side of caution.”
Despite the cracks, structural engineers later declared both buildings safe, and capitol operations resumed by 1 p.m.
Blind Spot in Disaster Response
Salinas admitted that Iloilo does have an intensity meter, but it is not calibrated by the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) and cannot provide precise readings.
Instead, disaster personnel rely on reports from guards observing furniture movement and building sway — an inadequate substitute for scientific measurement.
“Sadly, naglawig ang aton waiting period because wala sang maka-determine ano man gid ang intensity nag-hit sa provincial capitol or Iloilo Province,” he lamented.
He likened the situation to weather monitoring: “For weather disturbances, we have PAGASA (Philippine Atmospheric Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration… But on the ground, for earthquakes, we don’t have monitoring stations down here.”
Panay’s Most Devastating Earth Shaker
The strongest earthquake ever to strike Panay Island hit on January 25, 1948 — a magnitude 7.8 tremor that came to be known as the “Lady Caycay” quake.
With its epicenter near Anini-y, Antique, the quake registered a Mercalli intensity of X (“Extreme”), tearing open fissures as wide as four meters across Iloilo and Antique. The shaking even triggered a small tsunami along the Iloilo Strait that reportedly claimed two lives.
At least 21 people were killed and 43 others injured. Fifty-five Spanish-era churches were damaged, 17 of them collapsing entirely.
In Iloilo, historic belfries in Jaro, San Joaquin, and Arevalo toppled. Bridges crumbled, buildings gave way, and the land itself split open.
The “Lady Caycay” earthquake remains the second-strongest in Philippine history, next only to the 7.8-magnitude Luzon earthquake of 1990./PN
