Ep. 380: Earthquakes all over the Philippines

Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at outsourcing to the Philippines. This is episode 380, earthquakes all over the Philippines. So the Philippines recently had a bunch of earthquakes, and that's not, like, abnormal, but let's talk about natural disasters first. So the Philippines typically experiences, like, 40, like, 40 typhoons per year. I'm not sure if 40 is the number. It's not an exact number, obviously, but they get a lot of typhoons, and a typhoon is basically the equivalent of a hurricane in the U.S. they're, like, right on the pathway of Pacific typhoons. And they hit the Philippines and they're devastating and they destroy things, and then the Philippines rebuilds. And the Philippines, it's a small geographic country, but that's not the only thing that they deal with. They also deal with volcanic eruptions. It's an island nation of volcanoes. There are so many volcanoes and lots of active volcanoes, and they, when they erupt, they destroy things and they cause problems, and they create ash clouds all over the place. It's another natural disaster that the Philippines deals with. Earthquakes is another one. And this is the one I want to talk about in this episode. So recently, they had a bunch of earthquakes in Mindanao and the Visayas regions. And some of these were big, like, 7.0 earthquakes. And nobody on my team even said anything to me about it because it was just a normal occurrence to them. Now, I didn't know that. And when I heard about it, well, you guys had a 7.0 earthquake, and I know this wasn't super far from where a bunch of people on my team live. I approached them about it. Hey, what happened? And they were like, oh, it wasn't a big deal. But then in the course of sending out the 13th month to our people, we actually found out that it had affected people, and it kind of was a big deal for some of them. So maybe you can see this picture of one of them sent us multiple photos of their kitchen, and there are cracks all over the walls and the ceiling. And they're actually worried that it's going to cause the kitchen to completely cave in. And they said the 13th month, plus the bonus that we sent them is going to help them completely rebuild their kitchen. It's like, wow, we had no idea. You didn't say anything. You didn't even say there was an earthquake, much less that it made your whole kitchen crack. And you're worried it's all going to fall in and it's all cement and falling in is a really big deal. So after this I talked to Julia about it and had her write. So here's what she says. The earthquakes in Mindanao are not unusual. We get earthquakes like that at least once a month, magnitude 3 to 5. We're pretty used to it. But what was unusual about this last series of earthquakes was the frequency and size of the areas affected. Most of the time, it's pretty localized. The epicenter would experience the worst of it and the nearby regions would get a milder version. The aftershocks would last maybe a day, a week at most. This last earthquake was a bit stronger than normal and affected a really large area. The epicenter for the last earthquake is located in northern Mindanao, but it was felt by most of Mindanao and even reached the Visaya. So Mindanao is the region. It's also an island name. Davao is on this island along with a bunch of other cities. If you have people in the Philippines, you may have heard of some of their cities. So she's talking about Mindanao as the area, the region. The Visayas is like the central area of the Philippines. It's a whole bunch of islands and it would include like Iloilo and Cebu and Bacola. There's a whole bunch of. A whole bunch of medium sized cities in the Visayas, including the really big city of Cebu. So this earthquake and series of earthquakes. Earthquakes affected both of these regions, which is a. It's a really big area. She continues, as of this writing, we're still experiencing aftershocks. They're weakening, but we did feel it for days. Some may not even be aftershocks, but paranoia. In several instances, my husband and I thought there was another earthquake, but it was just unstable chairs or swinging pull switch chains, meaning it wasn't an earthquake at all. But they were still kind of scared or in shock from the earthquakes that had happened. She says, I know the reason earthquakes sound scary when you read about them in the news. A condominium complex in our city was even told by city building inspectors to move their unit owners and tenants because one of their buildings was unsafe. Having lived with earthquakes all my life, I'm not that worried about it because we have found ways to adapt and cope. The best example I have for this is to share what I was doing during the earthquake a few weeks back. Walking around the mall with my family, looking for a place to have dinner. She sends a picture that they took during the earthquake. She says, yes, we took a selfie just after the earthquake. We were on the third floor when we felt the building shake. We and the other people there calmly walked toward one of the major support columns. Knowing that it was one of the strongest places in the building, the shop owners automatically evacuated their stores and closed them. The building security evacuated the elevators, stairs, and escalators and moved people to safe areas. Once the earthquake stopped, we all walked out of the building to the designated evacuation area. Safety engineers were at the scene in a few minutes. No one was injured, but an ambulance was called for a lady who had a panic attack. We waited in the designated area for an hour until we were told we could return. They reopened the mall, and we had dinner. It's so surprising to me because I. So I was in Los Angeles for two earthquakes. The Northridge earthquake in, like, 1987, I think. And there was another one there that I was there for, and they were really scary and shocking to me. And this is such a normal part of life to her. She writes about it so casually. She says every aftershock since, our city government would send safety alerts, reminders, and safety engineers within minutes. The worst we experienced was losing electricity in the middle of the night, but that was reported and fixed in a few hours. There was also an earthquake in Luzon, but it wasn't as strong as the one we had here. They're also fine. Yeah, they're fine. Which is. So this is the MO of the Philippines and natural disasters. They're fine. And obviously, when a disaster destroys things, it's a big deal for those affected, but they recover so quickly. They recover from typhoons quickly. They recover from earthquakes quickly. They recover from volcanic eruptions quickly. It's amazing how quickly they recover. And it's one of the really great things about working with the Philippines. They're used to recovering quickly. When something goes wrong, they find a solution. And that's. And that's one of the big problems that typical US Outsourcing companies have had, is when someone in India runs into a problem, they don't find a solution because they're not allowed to find a solution culturally. Whereas the culture of the Philippines says, find a solution. Find a solution right now. And they want to work through things and make it work and find a solution. It's part of the culture.