Philippine Mayor Pleads for Helicopters as Hunger Grips Quake-Isolated Villages

The most urgent cry for help came not from Manila but from a coastal town mayor speaking to a Swedish radio station. Victor James Yap, mayor of the southern Philippine town of Glan, issued a desperate plea on Thursday for military helicopters to airlift food to ten villages rendered inaccessible by landslides. “We need food and water, but it’s difficult to transport aid to some districts that are cut off,” he told Aftonbladet. “Helicopters are required because people are very hungry.” Power lines are down, mobile networks are dead, and a city of over 100,000 inhabitants remains isolated days after one of the strongest quakes to hit the archipelago in half a century.

That tremor, a 7.8 magnitude offshore event on 8 June, struck deep in the Celebes Sea off Sarangani province. Across the affected farming communities, the official tally of 47 dead has inched higher. The Philippine Bureau of Fire Protection now puts the number of recovered bodies at 53, with several still awaiting identification, an indication that the toll may yet climb. More than 45,000 people have fled their homes, roughly half into emergency shelters, as aftershocks prolong the trauma. Over 12,600 houses are damaged. The province of Sarangani has the highest concentration of fatalities—20 confirmed dead—largely from a landslide that buried homes in Glan.

From Jakarta, seismologists are scrutinising whether the Mindanao quake could trigger dangerous stresses on the adjacent megathrust or lesser faults. Daryono, a member of the Indonesian Association of Disaster Experts, said there is so far no sign of such cascading failure. But a tremor of this size, he explained, can activate another fault if it lies close by and has reached its maximum strain accumulation—what he described as a source that is already “mature.” That analysis, aired by CNN Indonesia, adds a layer of cross-border scientific vigilance to an already anxious region.

The mayor’s plea for helicopters underscores a logistical race against time, as only air assets can bypass the landslides choking mountain roads. Philippine air force units are mobilising, but the sheer number of displaced and the psychological toll of repeated aftershocks complicate the operation. Viewed from London or Singapore, the episode reflects the familiar and recurring vulnerabilities of archipelagic states on the Pacific Ring of Fire, where every large seismic event carries the spectre of a wider tectonic chain reaction.