For families on the southern Philippine island of Mindanao, the count keeps climbing. Two days after a magnitude-7.8 earthquake struck offshore early on Monday, June 8, government authorities said 45 people had died, 487 were injured and 17 remained missing, a toll that had already risen from the 37 dead reported a day earlier. The human side is a generation of children who met their disaster on the first morning back at school.
The quake hit at 7:37 a.m., 32 kilometres offshore from Maasim in Sarangani province, while pupils across thousands of schools stood in flag-raising ceremonies for the start of the term. Footage showed children hugging each other, crouching low and praying as the ground moved. General Santos City, which felt intensity VIII shaking, bore the brunt; a tsunami alert emptied coastlines across nine provinces before it was lifted by mid-afternoon, with waves reaching only 1.4 metres above tide.
Rescue teams are still digging. The Coast Guard has deployed 150 responders with search dogs, working collapsed structures including a grocery store where people may be trapped. “Most of the buildings are heavily devastated, there are so many collapsed buildings,” Commodore Noemie Cayabyab told the ABC. An initial government assessment put damaged homes near 2,000 and damaged public buildings past 100; the United Nations now tallies 7,866 affected houses, 1,596 of them destroyed, with infrastructure losses near US$9.2 million.
The hardest single blow fell on the mountainside town of Glan, where the civil defence office said at least 18 people were killed by a landslide that buried homes. Aid agencies say damaged roads make the town hard to reach. “There’s a lot of totally damaged and partially damaged houses,” said Kristin Roxas of World Vision Philippines. “There are children along the streets, living in outdoor tents.” By June 10 more than 25,000 people were displaced, about 16,000 of them in 31 evacuation centres, out of 197,750 people affected overall.
What this means for the displaced, in the words of Faisah Ali of Save the Children Philippines: “We are anticipating that number will rise,” because “Evacuation centres cannot accommodate everybody, we have seen families that are are staying outside.” Blackouts and downed telecoms are isolating communities. “We have heard from the communities during our assessment that they have no access to electricity, the internet and the network is currently down,” she said, adding that families cut off by landslides are asking for immediate help restoring lifeline services.
Behind the numbers, the trauma is its own emergency. “The children are stressed and traumatised because of this earthquake,” Ms Roxas said, with classes suspended in more than 6,200 public and private schools affecting 3.2 million learners. President Ferdinand Marcos Jr has dispatched top officials from the capital to oversee search, rescue and relief, as aftershocks, now past 138, keep rattling the recovery.
Sources
- Tens of thousands displaced after magnitude-7.8 earthquake in Philippines – ABC News
- Philippines: Earthquake and Tsunami – Jun 2026 | ReliefWeb
