Terrifying Earthquake Topples Ceilings in Philippines Malls”

Shop­pers screamed in pan­ic as a pow­er­ful earth­quake caused ceil­ings to vio­lent­ly crash down in two south­ern Philip­pines malls. The mag­ni­tude 6.7 quake struck only 15 miles off the coast on Fri­day, shak­ing the entire region. Seis­mol­o­gists locat­ed the tremor 48 miles under­ground near Burias Island.

Videos of the ter­ri­fy­ing inci­dent cir­cu­lat­ing on social media show pil­lars sway­ing wild­ly as shop­pers cow­ered under falling debris. Crowds fled in ter­ror as ceil­ings plunged from high above at SM City Gen­er­al San­tos mall and neigh­bor­ing Robin­sons Gen­San mall. 

The pow­er­ful shak­ing tem­porar­i­ly shut­tered both shop­ping cen­ters amid the chaos until engi­neers could assess damages.

Mirac­u­lous­ly, no injuries were report­ed despite the fright­en­ing col­lapse of heavy ceil­ing pan­els onto crowd­ed retail floors. Pres­i­dent Fer­di­nand Mar­cos Jr. swung into action, order­ing all emer­gency respons­es to aid any­one trapped or injured in the dis­as­ter. Relief teams hur­ried to inspect build­ings for addi­tion­al struc­tur­al fail­ures across the quake zone.

The Remote Philip­pines arch­i­pel­ago strad­dles the seis­mi­cal­ly active “Ring of Fire” and endures reg­u­lar tremors. Res­i­dents remain on high alert for land­slides or destruc­tive tsunamis in the wake of strong shak­ing near coastal towns. 

Fur­ther eval­u­a­tion seeks to deter­mine if addi­tion­al seis­mic threats per­sist beneath the dev­as­tat­ed mall sites.