CEBU, Philippines, Oct 1, (AP): Rescuers used backhoes and sniffer dogs to look for survivors in collapsed houses and other damaged buildings in the central Philippines Wednesday, a day after an earthquake killed at least 69 people. The death toll was expected to rise from the magnitude-6.9 earthquake that hit at about 10 p.m. Tuesday and trapped an unspecified number of residents in the hard-hit city of Bogo and outlying rural towns in Cebu province.

Sporadic rain and damaged bridges and roads have hampered the race to save lives, officials said. "We’re still in the golden hour of our search and rescue,” Office of Civil Defense deputy administrator Bernardo Rafaelito Alejandro IV said in a news briefing. "There are still many reports of people who were pinned or hit by debris.”

The epicenter of the earthquake, which was set off by movement in an undersea fault line at a dangerously shallow depth of 5 kilometers (3 miles), was about 19 kilometers (12 miles) northeast of Bogo, a coastal city of about 90,000 people in Cebu province where about half of the deaths were reported, officials said.

The Philippine government is considering whether to seek help from foreign governments based on an ongoing rapid damage assessment, Alejandro said. The United States, Japan, Australia and the European Union expressed condolences. "We stand ready to support the Philippine government's response as friends, partners, allies,” MaryKay Carlson, US ambassador to the Philippines, said in a post on social media platform X.

Workers were trying to transport a backhoe to hasten search and rescue efforts in a cluster of shanties in a mountain village hit by a landslide and boulders, Bogo city disaster-mitigation officer Rex Ygot told The Associated Press early Wednesday. "It’s hard to move in the area because there are hazards,” said Glenn Ursal, another disaster-mitigation officer, who added that some survivors were brought to a hospital from the mountain village.

Deaths also were reported from the outlying towns of Medellin and San Remigio, where three coast guard personnel, a firefighter and a child were killed separately by collapsing walls and falling debris while trying to flee to safety from a basketball game in a sports complex that was disrupted by the quake, town officials said.

The earthquake was one of the most powerful to batter the central region in more than a decade and it struck while many people slept or were at home. The Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology briefly issued a tsunami warning and advised people to stay away from the coastlines of Cebu and the nearby provinces of Leyte and Biliran due to possible waves of up to 1 meter (3 feet).