The Philippines experienced a 6.3 earthquake yesterday that delivered severe damage to the city and took the lives of at least 16 persons. The brunt of the damage was experienced by the town of Porac, situated about 100 kilometers north of the country’s capital Manila. A number of videos from the city capture the aftermath of the earthquake with rescue workers tirelessly working round the clock to look for survivors under the debris. There’s another set of videos that shows a bizarre result of the natural disaster – a skyscraper’s rooftop pool getting emptied while the building sways.
The skyscraper is located in Manila Binondo district and shook when the tremors hit the city. This caused the rooftop pool to spill over its side. The skyscraper is known as Anchor Skysuites, and the mixed-use building is the tallest structure in any Chinatown around the world other than China.
The video that has been posted on YouTube shows the water making its way about halfway down the building before it becomes windswept mist. Generally, videos of earthquakes are filled with horror and devastating experiences. However, this particular videos shows a unique thing happening – a skyscraper’s rooftop pool getting emptied.
The Philippines gets regular earthquakes because of its location of the Pacific Ring of Fire. Almost 90% of the world’s earthquakes happen in this region. Over 220 persons were killed in the central Philippines back in 2013 when a tremor of magnitude 7.1 struck. The worst so far, however, has remained the earthquake of July 1990, an earthquake of a magnitude of 7.8, that killed over 2,400 people in the northern island of Luzon.
Although we have made astounding advancements in science and technology, earthquakes remain elusive still. Furthermore, even if you are able to predict an earthquake; you cannot adequately carry out evacuation to minimize the loss of life. A recent video from Minuteearth explained why predicting earthquakes is so hard. The video’s narrator said, ‘We have tried looking backward at earthquakes that already happened and identifying events that occurred in the days before they hit like multiple mini-quakes, big releases in radon gas, changes in magnetism and even weird animal behavior to see if any of these were predictors of an impending earthquake.’
Let’s hope that we are able to come up with an efficient way of predicting earthquakes and minimizing loss of life because of this natural disaster. Meanwhile, check out the skyscraper’s rooftop pool getting emptied in the following video!
