Vilma Lagnayo woke up on Saturday to a sobering reality – her family home of five years in the quiet coastal town of Manay in southern Philippines was gone.
The 56-year-old recalled that minutes before an offshore magnitude 7.4 quake hit at 9.43am on Friday, she was outside her house attending to house chores when the ground began to tremble softly.
Within seconds, the shaking turned violent – the walls of their house creaked and then collapsed, windows rattled, and the air filled with the sound of breaking glass and crashing furniture.
Lagnayo said she scrambled to the front of her house, where her 80-year-old mother was sitting in shock.
“I don’t know how we can start again. It really hurts because we’ve lost our home,” she told This Week in Asia in Tagalog, breaking into tears as she sat in a corner next to a pile of rubble where her house once stood.
In the neighbouring village of Poblacion, Mike Bandabon shared that at the height of the earthquake, his father, who was alone at home, was injured when a refrigerator fell on him.
Leave a Reply