Time and pressure are the forces that create an earthquake. You can build your home, your family, your life, on a geographical fault line and be ignorant of what is building beneath the surface. Then one day, without warning, the life you worked so hard to build is torn down.
Such was the case for the young Gonzales family on Monday, 16 July 1990, in the city of Baguio. The giant tremor that struck that day came like a bolt out of the blue. The earthquake killed or claimed as missing more than 1000 people out of Baguio’s population of around 120,000.
The main quake began at exactly 4.26 pm, measuring 7.7 on the Richter scale. It lasted only 45 seconds, but this was all the time it needed to tear down massive concrete office buildings and hotels. This quake was followed by at least 600 aftershocks over the next two days.
Teddy and Loiva were at their hotel when the ground started shaking. As the hotel began to collapse, everyone ran out of the front entrance onto Legarda Road. Everyone, that was, except for nine-year-old Sef. According to his Aunt Emily, Sef ran out the rear entrance into the back yard, where he discovered he was alone. Turning round, he ventured back into the hotel. The small boy was hit by a falling beam, which pinned his lower right leg to the ground. He couldn’t hope to free himself.
Teddy Gonzales noticed his son was not outside the hotel. Gathering his courage, he went back in to look for Sef. Inside the collapsed hotel it was dark and smoky.
‘Teddy actually had to crawl through the debris looking for him,’ says Emily.
Attracted by his son’s cries of pain and panic, Teddy pulled Sef from the wreckage, then turned his attention to getting his son medical help.
Dr Amado Dizon, an orthopaedic surgeon, was having a coffee in Baguio’s main street, Session Road, when the earthquake hit. He watched in disbelief as the earth began to open and close like some ghastly, giant mouth, devouring all in its path. Shattered glass rained down from tall buildings, and people were running everywhere, shouting and crying. ‘I thought it was the end of the world,’ he remembers.
Dr Dizon remained calm. His wife, also a doctor, was uninjured at her clinic in central Baguio, but his two-year-old son was at home with his nanny. He had to make sure they were safe. He drove in the direction of home, hiking the last 800 metres due to a blocked road, and collected his son and nanny.
Once his family’s safety was assured, his next thought was to help others who were not as fortunate. At about 6 pm, he arrived at Notre Dame de Lourdes Hospital. The quake and subsequent aftershocks had made the hospital buildings unsafe, and staff grabbed the medical supplies they needed from inside before setting up a work area in the hospital’s carpark.
It was raining and getting dark as Teddy and Loiva arrived with their injured son. ‘I think the mother was crying. He [Teddy] was a little bit calm, and asked me if I could do anything to help,’ recalls Dr Dizon. ‘The thought [they had] was that the kid was about to have an amputation.’
Inspecting Sef’s injured leg, Dr Dizon saw there was a massive crushing injury, but no broken bones. However, the skin had been smashed off, exposing the muscle underneath, and the child was losing blood. It was not a life-threatening injury, but one of the 30 or 40 serious injuries Dr Dizon had to treat that night. The biggest risk was infection.
He assured Teddy that Sef’s leg could be saved.
‘So first, because it was getting dark, I just gave emergency treatment. I packed the wound, and gave fluid and antibiotic,’ says Dr Dizon.
Over the course of the next two days, aid began flooding into Baguio. Tents were set up in the parking lot of the hospital for use as operating theatres.
Sef would undergo a number of operations in the makeshift surgeries. He was given anaesthetic for the painful procedure of cleaning the wound. Dr Dizon used an electrical apparatus to ‘harvest’ skin from Sef’s uninjured left leg. This skin was stitched onto Sef’s wounds, then covered with a pressure bandage to ensure it grafted properly.
Within a fortnight, Sef was released from hospital, and Teddy could not express enough gratitude to the doctor who saved his son’s leg. He presented Dr Dizon with a glass cocktail set as a thank-you present. After all, Teddy had made a momentous decision, and that decision meant he did not need the glasses himself any more.
‘He told me he was planning to emigrate to Australia. Of course, his business, the hotel, was gone,’ Dr Dizon says.
Teddy’s family remember his devastation at the time.
Freddie Gonzales was not in Baguio when the earthquake occurred. He came back a month later and saw what had happened to his brother’s hotel. Freddie’s hotel next door, miraculously, was saved, and Freddie felt for his brother. ‘It was a total collapse, it was not repairable, it was a total loss,’ he says.
Teddy was in tears as he showed his brother the wreckage in Legarda Road. ‘The first thing when he saw me, he embraced me and cried right along [the] sidewalk . . . He cried and said why did this have to happen? I said it’s okay, you’re young, you can start again.’
Teddy was grateful he had not lost any family members, but the financial loss — and the fact he had to fork out for the demolition of his hotel’s remains — made him extremely bitter, says Freddie. ‘He felt very depressed with the material loss. It was years of hard work. He felt devastated, he was disgusted.’
Despite attempts by Freddie and his parents to persuade Teddy to stay in Baguio, Teddy believed his future was in Australia. It was an opportunity for a new beginning. He liked the lifestyle he’d had a taste of during his 1988 visit to Australia — the government, the people and the availability of land, the fact it was not overcrowded like the Philippines. He saw the opportunity there of returning to the practice of law, and prospering. And his family would be close to his wife’s relatives in Sydney.
Ironically, it was their losses in the Philippines that would reaffirm Teddy and Loiva’s faith in God. Already Catholic, they became more devout after the earthquake. They believed God, through the quake, had granted them a chance to make a fresh start in another country.
‘So it was a new life for them and the first thing [Teddy] told me [when he arrived in Australia], which I cannot forget, is “You know, God always has something better in store”,’ Freddie recalls.
‘He saw the tragedy in the Philippines as a blessing. Something good came out by becoming residents of Australia.’