MARGINALIA | Five Minutes

COTABATO CITY (MindaNews / 17 August 2026) – Five minutes.

Try measuring it.

Make coffee and watch the clock. Scroll through Facebook. Reply to one message, perhaps two. Stand outside your house and talk to a neighbor.

Five minutes can disappear without announcing itself.

Fifty years ago today, along parts of the Moro Gulf, five minutes could mean something else entirely. At 12:11 in the morning of August 17, 1976, the earth shook. Then the sea came. Thousands never returned.

The old report on the Moro Gulf tsunami eventually recommended something painfully simple: after a violent earthquake, people along vulnerable coasts should reach higher ground within five minutes.

I kept thinking about those five minutes. Not fifty years. Five minutes. It’s because anniversaries tempt us toward the past. We search for old photographs. We count the dead again. We tell younger people that such a terrible thing happened here once.

Then tomorrow arrives. The anniversary ends. And the sea remains where it was.

Suppose the shaking begins tonight. Not the gentle sort that makes us check the hanging lamp and ask, “Lumindol ba?” I mean violent shaking.

You are somewhere near the Moro Gulf. Perhaps Cotabato City. Perhaps Datu Odin Sinsuat. Lebak. Pagadian. A coastal barangay somewhere farther west. The electricity goes out. Your phone falls from the table. The children wake up. What do you do next?

More importantly: where do you go? Do you know? Does your mother know? Can your elderly neighbor get there? Can five minutes carry all of you?

These questions sound less dramatic than the photographs we display during disaster anniversaries. But photographs cannot evacuate anyone. Memory might.

We did not have to wait fifty years for the earth to remind us. On June 8 this year, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck off Sarangani. PHIVOLCS issued a tsunami warning covering coastal communities across a wide part of southern Mindanao and the Bangsamoro. Small tsunami waves were subsequently recorded at several monitoring stations.

For many of us, the shaking itself was frightening enough. But somewhere along the coast, people had another decision to make: Wait for instructions? Look at Facebook? Call a relative? Or run?

There is a strange thing about modern life. We have more information than our grandparents ever had.  Yet sometimes we wait for information when our own senses have already told us enough. If the earth shakes violently beside a tsunami-prone coast, the first warning may already be beneath your feet. No internet required.

Muslims speak often of tawakkul—trust in Allah. Sometimes we misunderstand it. We say, In shā’ Allāh, nothing will happen. There is comfort in that sentence.

There can also be danger.

Trust in Allah was never meant to become an excuse for refusing the means Allah has placed before us. We fasten the door at night. We bring medicine to someone who is ill. We study before an examination and still make du‘ā.

Why should disaster preparedness be different?

The Qur’an tells us: Let every soul look to what it has sent ahead for tomorrow (59:18). Tomorrow, in that verse, is larger than an evacuation plan. But the moral habit is recognizable: faith asks us to look ahead. Preparation is not a denial of qadar. It is part of responsibility.

What did we inherit from 1976? This question troubles me.

We inherited stories, certainly. Families around the Moro Gulf still remember relatives who disappeared that night. In some communities, older people remember the sea withdrawing. Others remember running through darkness. Names that disappeared from households remained in family stories.

But what else did we inherit? An evacuation route? A warning system? A schoolchild who knows what to do without waiting for a teacher? A barangay captain who can point, immediately, to the safest ground? An imam who knows that after a strong coastal earthquake, the mosque loudspeaker may become a life-saving instrument?

That is a different kind of inheritance. And unlike memory, it has to be maintained. A faded evacuation sign is not preparedness. Neither is a disaster plan stored inside a filing cabinet. Nor a drill where everyone knows beforehand that at exactly 9:00 a.m. somebody will ring a bell, and everybody will walk calmly outside.

Real disasters are rude. They arrive while we are sleeping. While somebody is cooking. While children are bathing. While the barangay captain is somewhere else. While the mobile signal is weak.

Universities can help here, but we should be careful about how. We academics sometimes arrive carrying maps. They are useful maps. Hazard zones. Inundation models. Coordinates. Elevation.

Then an elderly woman says, “The water reached that coconut tree in 1976.”

Do we listen? We should. Her memory is not a replacement for PHIVOLCS data. But neither should the scientific map make her memory irrelevant. Put them together. Ask where people ran. Which paths became crowded. Which houses disappeared. Where the water stopped.

That is how a community becomes more than the place where researchers collect respondents. It becomes a keeper of knowledge. Fifty years after the Moro Gulf tsunami, there are still survivors who can speak. We should record them while we can. Someday the last person who saw that sea coming will be gone. After that, we will have only what we chose to preserve.

So, perhaps the proper way to mark August 17 is not simply with fifty candles, fifty years, fifty speeches. Find a coastal barangay. Give no elaborate warning. Say only: the violent shaking has stopped. Now move. Start the clock. One minute. Two. A mother is looking for her child. Three. An elderly man cannot move quickly. Four. Someone has taken the wrong road because the evacuation sign is hidden behind a new building. Five.

Where is everybody?

That answer will tell us more about fifty years of preparedness than many commemorative programs. There is an Islamic word for responsibility entrusted to us: amānah.

Memory can be an amānah, too. The people who died in 1976 cannot tell us where to run next time. But they left us a warning. Fifty years later, perhaps the question is no longer whether we remember them. The harder question is whether we learned enough from their deaths to keep somebody else alive.

Five minutes.

Start counting.

#Mindanao #MoroGulfEarthquake #1976MoroGulfTsunami #TsunamiPH #DisasterPreparedness

[MindaViews is the opinion section of MindaNews. Mansoor L. Limba, PhD in International Relations and Shari‘ah Counselor-at-Law (SCL), is a publisher-writer, university professor, vlogger, chess trainer, and translator (from Persian into English and Filipino) with tens of written and translation works to his credit on such subjects as international politics, history, political philosophy, intra-faith and interfaith relations, cultural heritage, Islamic finance, jurisprudence (fiqh), theology (‘ilm al-kalam), Qur’anic sciences and exegesis (tafsir), hadith, ethics, and mysticism. He can be reached at mlimba@diplomats.com and http://www.youtube.com/@WayfaringWithMansoor, and his books can be purchased at www.elzistyle.com and https://ift.tt/YpD6lr2.]