The death toll from a powerful earthquake in the central Philippines rose to 72 on Thursday, officials said, as the search for the missing wound down and rescuers turned their focus to the hundreds injured and thousands left homeless.
The bodies of the three victims were pulled from the rubble of a collapsed hotel overnight Wednesday in the city of Bogo, near the epicentre of the 6.9-magnitude quake that struck on Tuesday.
“We have zero missing, so the assumption is all are accounted for,” National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council spokesman Junie Castillo said, adding that some rescue units in Cebu province have been told to “demobilise”.
The government said 294 people were injured and around 20,000 had fled their homes. Nearly 600 houses were wrecked across the north of Cebu, and many are sleeping on the streets as hundreds of aftershocks shake the area.
He also visited a partially damaged housing project in Bogo, built for survivors of the 2013 Super Typhoon Haiyan, one of the deadliest natural disasters to hit the Philippines. Eight bodies were “recovered from collapsed houses” in the project following the quake, a local government statement said.
A tiny village chapel in Bogo was serving as a temporary shelter for 18-year-old Diane Madrigal and 14 of her neighbours after their houses were destroyed. Their clothes and food were scattered across the chapel’s pews.
“The entire wall (of my house) fell, so I really don’t know how and when we can go back again,” Madrigal told AFP.