Bay Area Filipino community worried after 7.8 quake strikes southern Philippines
Members of the Bay Area's Filipino community expressed worry about loved ones back home after a magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck the southern part of the country.
Christian Flaviano thousands of miles away from his homeland of the Philippines, but that's the only thing on his mind.
"I've seen it on social media earlier. And then I worried about all the students in the school because today is the first day in school. Yeah, I worry about a lot of the students there," Flaviano told CBS News Bay Area.
He's been working as a chef at Karilagan in South San Francisco for the past seven years. He moved from the Philippines to the Bay Area back in 2017.
After he heard of the terrifying earthquake online, he urgently called his family back home. Fortunately, he said, his family is safe.
Officials said the epicenter of the earthquake was roughly 10 to 20 miles off the southern coast of Mindanao around 7:30 a.m. Monday local time.
"It's close enough to cause severe shaking and damage, but fortunately, it wasn't under a major city which would have caused a lot more damage," Paul Earle, a seismologist with USGS, told CBS News Bay Area. "For example, the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco is comparable size to this earthquake. We've seen pictures of what happened in that earthquake."
"This area is also much more complicated than the Bay Area, where you have two large plates that are moving towards each other at about 3 inches per year. But in between those large plates, you have lots of little plates. You have about five small plates interacting in different ways. So, the Philippines are much more seismically active than California," he added.
Earle said the Bay Area should not be seeing any ripple effects from the earthquake.
"You're not going to see any effects in California. It's possible if you have a larger earthquake, you can send a tsunami across the ocean. This earthquake was not large enough to send a tsunami," he said.
Alyza Garcia was born in the Philippines and moved to the Bay Area when she was eight years old. She said she also checked in with her family back home who are safe.
"It is devastating to see families sometimes displaced and also, unfortunately, it's hard for families to get resources or help. And then that they always have to rebuild, but it's always very admiring to see how much community helps each other," Garcia told CBS News Bay Area.
