A suspicious explosive device exploded while being destroyed in the southern Philippines, injuring 27 people, most of them explosives experts, police said today.
The explosion happened yesterday as a team of police, coast guard, sailors and firefighters extinguished a fire that broke out in a nearby warehouse, the site of the June explosion. 29 killed five people and injured 38 others in the city of Zamboanga on the island of Mindanao. This fire is the third and last unit that will be transferred from the warehouse to the government’s abandoned place for the controlled explosion, the spokesman of the local police, Lt. Col. Helen Galvez.
They were taken out of a pickup truck and were being dumped when they were quickly engulfed in flames. It was an accident, Galvez said.
It’s not a big explosion. Twenty members of the mine clearance team were injured, six of them seriously.
Seven civilians were seriously injured when the explosion damaged 12 nearby houses and other buildings, as well as four vehicles.
The Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology on Thursday morning revised the magnitude of the earthquake that hit the Sultan Kudarat region of the southern Philippines from 6.5 to 7.1.
The agency initially reported the earthquake, which occurred at 10:13 a.m., had a magnitude of 6.5.
In an updated report, the agency said the earthquake occurred at a depth of 722 km, about 133 km southwest of Palimbang, a coastal town.
The disaster is also in the neighboring region of Mindanao, the second largest island in the country, including Davao Occidental, Davao Oriental, Sarangani, Davao de Oro, Davao del Norte and Cotabato. The company said that tectonic earthquakes will cause earthquakes but not damage. He added that the earthquake will not trigger heavy rains. Meanwhile, Indonesia’s Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency reported that an earthquake with a magnitude of 5.8 struck the western region of Bengkulu on Wednesday evening, but it did not cause any major waves.
The earthquake occurred at 10:32 p.m., with its epicenter located 145 km northwest of Enggano Island, which has a depth of 10 km under the sea. There was no tsunami warning because the quake was expected to cause huge waves.
Indonesia and the Philippines are prone to earthquakes due to their location on the seismically active Pacific Ring of Fire.
