THE PHILIPPINES: Shock at Manila

At 7:20 one evening last week, the S. S. President Jefferson tied up in Manila harbor and 376 refugees, evacuated from Shanghai three days before, disembarked on the dock to the gay music of a Marine band. An hour later Manila’s brightly lighted water front was suddenly plunged into pitch darkness. The dock on which the refugees were standing in confused groups began to shake. With a terrifying roar the roof above split apart. “They’re bombing us again!” screamed a woman refugee. Another shrieked: “Is this another war?”

It was not another war but Manila’s worst earthquake since 1882. Half an hour later it was followed by another almost as severe. One resident of nearby Cavite died of heart-failure. Sixty-two were injured, some by falling power lines, some in stampedes out of crowded cinema theatres. When the lights were finally turned on again, the Escolta, Manila’s main street, was littered with broken glass, parts of the city were flooded by snapped water mains. The nine-story Great Eastern Hotel—whose terrified guests rushed out of their rooms more or less dressed—had settled four inches. Most of Manila’s buildings, designed to withstand quakes, are built of bolted timbers. They stood the shock better than old Spanish stone houses and churches outside the town, many of whose walls and roofs crumbled. Before total damage had been estimated, Commonwealth-President Manuel Quezon—who had been dressing for a banquet in his Malacanan palace when the earthquake struck—proclaimed a state of emergency, threatened severe penalties for anyone who tried to utilize the coincidence of the earthquake and the influx of refugees for profiteering.

One of the most celebrated U. S. citizens involved in the Japanese earthquake of 1924 was Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt Sr. who was on a world tour. That the family of the 26th U. S. president could hope last week to keep up with that of the 32nd (see p. 18) was of course unthinkable, but no more unthinkable than that the former would give up without a fight. From Shanghai, where she had been keeping herself ably in the limelight, Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt Jr. last week arrived in Manila on the President Jefferson just in time to maintain her clan’s record for attendance at oriental earthquakes. Said she, in an able radio broadcast: “I want to extend heartfelt thanks for the way in which we were received at Manila. All the church bells rang out for us. I suppose I must add that it was caused by the . . . earthquake. . . .”

Centre of last week’s quake was located three miles from Manila’s downtown district. Seismologists rated the force of the first tremor between five and six on the scale which measures the lightest shocks as one, heaviest on record as ten. In Cambridge, Mass, last week. Dr. Lewis Don Leet of Harvard first learned of the quake by telegraph.