Philippines Earthquake: woman gives birth at Cebu City roadside
WOMAN GIVES BIRTH TO HEALTHY BABY BOY AT CEBU CITY ROADSIDE AMID MAGNITUDE 6.9 QUAKE Shortly after the 6.9-magnitude earthquake struck Cebu at 9:59 p.m. on Tuesday night, September 30.
Patients of Cebu City Medical Center (CCMC) were immediately evacuated to the open area outside of the hospital.
Among the last to leave the building was Dr. Gracita Rabago, an obstetrician-gynecologist, who was still taking care of three women who just gave birth in the labor room.
Among those wheeled out of the hospital was another woman who was fully dilated and ready to give birth to her first baby.
Even then, the team successfully delivered a healthy baby boy by the roadside.
The baby boy is currently under the care of the Pediatrics Department.
As of press time, the mother, who was admitted with high blood pressure, is still being monitored by doctors so she can be reunited with her baby and later discharged from the hospital.
Rabago said the successful delivery was a collective effort by the OB-GYN department’s doctors, nurses, midwives, and the entire CCMC team.
“Thank you to everyone for helping out. Big thanks to he student nurses and their CI (class instructor) who was on duty that time at the CCMC labor room,” she said.
The death toll from a powerful earthquake in the central Philippines rose to 72 on Thursday, officials said, as the search for the missing wound down and rescuers turned their focus to the hundreds injured and thousands left homeless.
The bodies of the three latest victims were pulled from the rubble of a collapsed hotel overnight in the city of Bogo, near the epicentre of the 6.9-magnitude quake that struck on Tuesday.
“We have zero missing, so the assumption is all are accounted for,” National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council spokesman Junie Castillo said, adding that some rescue units in Cebu province had been told to “demobilise”.
President Ferdinand Marcos flew to Bogo with senior aides on Thursday, pledging to put up a “tent city” to temporarily house those whose dwellings were among the 600 wrecked by the quake.
Also to be accommodated there will be the thousands more whose homes remained structurally intact but who fear being caught up in the wave of aftershocks that still sweep the region.
The government said 294 people were injured and around 20,000 had fled their homes across the north of Cebu. Many are sleeping on the streets.
More than 110,000 people in 42 communities affected by the quake will need assistance to rebuild their homes and restore their livelihoods, according to the regional civil defence office.
Marcos told reporters the main impact of the quake had been to infrastructure, with officials unsure about the condition of evacuation centres, which meant “we don’t have anything to house the displaced families”.
“Our decision was to procure giant tents… We will build a tent city that can be put up swiftly and will shield people from rain,” he told reporters, pledging to supply it with food, water and electricity.
He also vowed to restore electricity to Bogo, a city of 90,000, by the end of the day and to provide a token worth 10,000 pesos ($172) to each family that lost their home.
Marcos also visited a partially damaged housing project in Bogo, built for survivors of the 2013 Super Typhoon Haiyan, one of the deadliest natural calamities to hit the Philippines.
Eight bodies were “recovered from collapsed houses” in the project following the quake, a local government statement said.
