CEBU, Philippines — Rescuers used backhoes and sniffer dogs to look for survivors in collapsed houses and other damaged buildings in the central Philippines on 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.

Richard Guion, his left elbow heavily bandaged, told how he and his wife, who broke her foot, were dug from under the collapsed concrete wall of their home by their 17-year-old son, who was playing outside when the quake struck.

“When the cement collapsed, I called out to him,” said the 39-year-old Guion, thankful his son ignored his order to go to bed early.

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.”

Teddy Fontillas, 56, told AFP he had not slept while he helped transfer the injured to other hospitals.

“I’m already struggling, but what we are doing is necessary to help our patients,” he said.

Elsewhere in Bogo, firemen used excavators to drill holes into the collapsed heap of a two-story motel, where two receptionists and a child were feared trapped beneath debris.

A distraught Isagani Jilig, whose wife and child are among the missing, joined about a hundred people watching the rescue.

“I will never leave this site until I find them again. As a father, I have to be strong now more than ever,” Jilig, 41, told AFP.

Fireman Erwin Castaneda said they had been searching for five hours, but “we cannot give up.”

“We are talking about lives here. We will do everything that we can,” he told AFP.

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,” Mary Kay 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 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).

No such waves were reported, and the tsunami warning was lifted more than three hours later, but thousands of traumatized residents refused to return home and chose to stay in open grassy fields and parks overnight despite intermittent rains.

Cebu and other provinces were still recovering from a tropical storm that battered the central region on Friday, leaving at least 27 people dead, mostly due to drownings and falling trees, knocking out power in entire cities and towns and forcing the evacuation of tens of thousands of people.

Schools and government offices were closed in the quake-hit cities and towns while the safety of buildings was checked. More than 600 aftershocks have been detected after Tuesday night’s temblor, Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology director Teresito Bacolcol said.

Rain-soaked mountainsides were more susceptible to land- and mudslides in a major earthquake, he warned.

“This was really traumatic to people. They’ve been lashed by a storm, then jolted by an earthquake,” Bacolcol said. “I don’t want to experience what they’ve gone through.”

The Philippines, one of the world’s most disaster-prone countries, is often hit by earthquakes and volcanic eruptions due to its location on the Pacific “Ring of Fire,” an arc of seismic faults around the ocean. The archipelago is also lashed by about 20 typhoons and storms each year.