TWENTY-THREE years ago today, on July 16, 1990, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck Luzon. It isn’t the strongest quake in Philippine history, or the deadliest, but it’s the most destructive on record.
It left a swath of crumbled hotels, collapsed buildings and bridges, and agricultural lands laid waste by fissures, liquefaction, and redirected rivers, from Manila all the way to Baguio—which means the Kapampangan Region was smack in the middle.
We Kapampangans would still remember the day except that June 15, 1991 came soon after. The eruption of Mount Pinatubo, which occurred while Kapampangans were still reeling from the effects of The Great Luzon Earthquake the previous year, became the reference point of everything else that happened before and after.
Not even World War II, or the Revolution against Spain, or all the earthquakes in history put together, can match Pinatubo’s impact on the individual and collective destinies of Kapampangans. In fact, we now reckon all events in our history and personal lives as Before Pinatubo and After Pinatubo—the same way Christians divide their salvation history into B.C. and A.D.
It struck at 4:26 p.m. while I was in my office at Holy Angel University. It was actually only 3:26 p.m. but a Daylight Saving Time (DST) was in effect so all clocks and watches had been advanced one hour.
When I ran out I saw a scene that was straight out of World War Z. Thousands of panicked students and teachers were making a mad dash out of the buildings, falling on top of one another. Those who could not squeeze through the staircase jumped off the parapets and landed on the roof of a lower building.
Across the school oval I saw shock waves literally rolling towards me, like sea waves approaching the shore before breaking. When the waves reached me I was lifted off the ground and thrown against a wall. Students, also unable to stand on their feet, wailed like crazy as they crawled away from buildings. I remember thinking: Metro-Manila has probably fallen into the sea!
But the quake’s epicenter was north of Pampanga instead of south (exact location: Digdig, Nueva Ecija). The calamity that befell us, it turned out, was nothing compared to the horror in Baguio City, where three of my sisters were studying at the time. When it was over, Hyatt Terraces and practically all the multi-story structures in the mountain resort had either collapsed or were on the verge of collapsing.
My friend who was teaching at the University of Baguio at the time recalled that the classroom see-sawed like crazy, throwing students and chairs in a pile against the wall. Another friend saw a section of the façade of a building in my alma mater St. Louis University (SLU) slide down and fall into the driveway below. He said an ongoing student boycott had kept tens of thousands of students out of campus, which was a good thing because it prevented what was sure to be a chaotic scene.
I knew some of the people who were crushed to death when Hyatt Terraces crumbled like a deck of cards. My acquaintances were among those buried by landslides along Kennon Road. One mother saw her child being pinned to death by a falling pine tree. The wife of Senator Raul Roco survived the collapse of Hotel Nevada near the Camp John Hay gate; her friend, the wife of former Central Bank Governor Jaime Laya, didn’t.
My sisters said the quake was accompanied by a deep groaning sound, like two giant slabs of underground rock grinding against each other. The quake whipped up a cloud of dust that rose above the city, they said, followed immediately by a downpour that came with lightning, thunder and hailstones.
They were mystified by all the forces of nature converging in that one wicked moment, until they experienced Pinatubo the following year. “On July 16, 1990 we had quakes, rain, lightning and hailstones,” they said. “But on June 15, 1991 we had a volcanic eruption, more quakes, lightning and rain, all kinds of rain—water, ash, sand and rocks!”
We didn’t have cell phones and Internet in 1990, so with power and telephone lines down, we didn’t know if my three sisters and other relatives in Baguio were still alive, or were among the corpses on the street waiting for their turn at the overcrowded funeral homes, as the media reported.
They showed up in Mabalacat more than a week later, narrating how they climbed down Naguilian Road on foot and how they saw people clambering over landslides and falling off cliffs when aftershocks struck.
When I joined a University team (led by Red Cross official Cecile Yumul) during a rescue-relief operation along Kennon Road a few days later, I saw what I thought was a pile of rice in the middle of the abandoned road. It turned out to be a dead man all covered with fat maggots. I retched for hours after that.
Who knows if that July 16, 1990 earthquake led to the June 15, 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo, but less than two hours after the quake, at 6:10 p.m., a magnitude 4.8 earthquake struck the Mount Pinatubo area. It wasn’t an aftershock that came from the source of the first earthquake, scientists say, but an entirely different earthquake that originated in the cracks (faults) underneath Mount Pinatubo. Apparently, the Luzon earthquake was so massive it rattled the local faults around the mountain, which in turn triggered tremors of their own, like vibrations from one tuning fork causing another to vibrate.
I ask all of us who survived Pinatubo to take a pause today and remember those who perished and suffered in the Luzon earthquake.