What does it take for an ordinary night to turn into a wound you carry forever? In Cebu, the answer came without warning. 

At 9:59 pm on September 30, 2025, Cebuano families were preparing to sleep, students scrolling on their phones after homework, call center agents just about to log in for their night shift, when the ground roared beneath them. A magnitude 6.9 earthquake struck just 21 kilometers northeast of Bogo City. 

The shaking lasted only 30 seconds, but the devastation it left will be remembered for decades. Across northern Cebu, towns from Daanbantayan to San Remigio and Medellin to Bogo were hardest hit. 

In San Remigio, what should have been a carefree basketball game ended in tragedy when the roof of a sports complex caved in, killing five people, including Coast Guard personnel and a firefighter. In Bogo, a McDonald’s collapsed into twisted steel and glass. In Daanbantayan, the centuries-old Shrine of Santa Rosa de Lima, a heritage church that had survived storms, crumbled into rubble.

By morning, the official toll had risen to 68 dead, with 559 injured and nearly 20,000 families displaced. More than 5,000 aftershocks rattled Cebu in just three days, one as strong as magnitude 5.3. 

Damage reached over P3 billion, enough to wipe out years of local progress in minutes. But what turned a natural disaster into a humanitarian nightmare were the failures long before the quake. 

On September 30, Cebu trembled under a 6.9-magnitude quake. In the days after, it was shaken by the truth: disasters become deadlier when those in power fail to protect the people they serve.

Lessons not learned

If this were Cebu’s first catastrophe, the scale of suffering might be attributed to shock or inexperience. But this was not Cebu’s first disaster. Just four years earlier, Typhoon Odette slammed into the island in December 2021, tearing roofs from homes, snapping power lines, and leaving the Queen City of the South in darkness for weeks. 

The government promised that Odette would be a turning point. Billions in aid were pledged, and officials swore Cebu would be better prepared next time. But three years later, the truth came out: P712 million in housing assistance meant for Odette survivors was never released. In 2024, the National Housing Authority (NHA) admitted the money was simply returned to the Treasury.

The reason was a standoff. The NHA wanted only families with “destroyed homes” to get P10,000 each, based on its official list of 72,209 households. The Capitol under then-governor Gwen Garcia insisted on a wider distribution, arguing that hundreds of thousands of families with damaged homes deserved help too. Neither side gave way. In the end, nothing was distributed. Survivors waited but the aid never came.

That failure lingered like an open wound. And when the ground split in September 2025, Cebu bled from the same negligence. In Bogo City, the provincial hospital that is the closest major facility to the epicenter was overwhelmed within hours. Ambulances and mortuary vans kept arriving, unloading patients with shattered bones and bodies pulled from collapsed homes, until there were no more beds in the morgue. 

Thirty of the dead came from Bogo alone, including seven members of the Catarman family, four of them killed instantly when their house caved in. The father, Lito, could only plead for enough money to bury his child and grandchildren.

Preparedness existed only in speeches. On the ground, what Cebuanos saw was the same thing they had seen since Odette: a vacuum of planning and an abandonment that forced Cebuanos to carry one another through disaster once again.

How corruption magnifies disasters

Earthquakes, by nature, do not discriminate. They do not choose between rich and poor, city or province, believer or skeptic. But in the Philippines, it often feels like the earth has accomplices—officials with padded bank accounts who sign off on substandard cement and pocket the difference.

The most glaring case is the P118-billion flood control scandal, exposed just months before the Cebu earthquake. Since 2022, some P545 billion has been poured into flood control, yet thousands of projects turned out to be substandard or nonexistent. Senate hearings revealed kickbacks as high as 30 percent, with billions in cash delivered in paper bags to lawmakers’ homes. 

A former DPWH undersecretary admitted personally handing over bribes, while an ex-military aide described “basura runs” of cash to politicians. By September, more than 700 bank accounts linked to the scam had been frozen. Contractors like Sarah and Curlee Discaya flaunted fleets of luxury cars while communities drowned in floods. 

The Department of Finance itself admitted the scheme drained P118.5 billion from the economy between 2023 and 2025. This was money that could have reinforced public hospitals in northern Cebu, or finished the evacuation centers in San Remigio and Daanbantayan, or replaced the flimsy housing that collapsed on families still displaced from Typhoon Odette in 2021. 

Greenpeace Philippines estimates up to P1.029 trillion in climate and disaster spending since 2023 may have been misused or siphoned off. That is why so many “resilient” structures never materialized because the money vanished long before the ground shook.

Resilience as a cruel excuse

After the 6.9-magnitude earthquake, thousands of young volunteers gathered at the Cebu Provincial Capitol to repack relief goods for affected families. They moved with urgency, carrying what the state refused to deliver on time. Meanwhile, the disaster that tore through Northern Cebu was a tremor in governance, a reminder that in the Philippines, survival is left to the people because those in power have spent years stealing the safety net meant for them.

Filipinos are expected to be resilient because accountable governance is nearly always absent. We are made to be heroes in disasters we did not create, carrying each other through rubble the government should have prevented. 

Why are we applauded for enduring what we should never have endured? Why must ordinary Filipinos play first responder to a government that fails at its most basic responsibility?

The cruelest damage is what corruption leaves behind: a people conditioned to expect nothing, forced to carry one another through disaster, while those in power tally casualties like line items in a budget. Generations of theft have normalized abandonment, and every calamity makes clear that in the Philippines, nature shakes the ground but it is corruption that pulls the roof down.