Just as we are to wrap up our workday we felt a strong earthquake at our office this evening, around 6:30 pm. The movement was vertical, quite different from our previous experiences where the movement we felt was horizontal. The memory of the tsunami in Japan is still fresh on the minds of the people, so it was expected that our colleagues on our floor (7th of a 10 floor building) got frantic after feeling the quake. I also felt the jolt with my seat moving up then down. I was surprised but I doubted if it was indeed an earthquake, since during that time there are some drilling work being done just across our office. Thank goodness for twitter, within a minute we already know that it was indeed a quake, initially pegged at magnitude 4.6 then promoted to 5.7. The details are provided on the Phivolcs site. They mentioned that the body of water hit is the Manila Trench. I think these series of earthquakes and the recent quakes in our province Ilocos Norte are somewhat related, considering that the western part of Luzon runs parallel to the Manila trench. I suspect that an earthquake may soon emanate from this side of our country. I am not a geologist but my guts tell me such. Even this article mentioned that Phivolcs suspects that the Manila trench could generate a strong earthquake and tsunami.
I just pray that we can be spared from a strong earthquake, although I know that we are hopeless in the face of natural occurences such as these. I may need to check on survival tips and what to do in case earthquakes and tsunamis strike. I pray also that the Japanese people would overcome their ordeal caused by the 9.0 quake and tsunami. Hopefully their nuclear reactor incident in Fukushima will also soon be contained. I would certainly remember March 2011 as a very troubled month for the world. Hopefully the war in Libya will also come to an end. What the world really needs now is God’s kingdom.
