City Government of Valenzuela joins the Metrowide Shake Drill, July 30, 2015. Staged at the ALERT Center in Brgy. Karuhatan and along MacArthur Highway, the one-hour drill began with fire trucks, ambulances, and police cars sounding their sirens at 10:30 a.m. Exercises carried out by the fire department, police, and local search and rescue team included putting out burning steel drums and rescuing victims from inside a crashed vehicle and the second floor of the fire station. The Shake Drill was meant to prepare local governments for the “Big One”, a 7.2-magnitude earthquake that could be brought about by the movement of the 100-km West Marikina Valley Fault that begins in the Sierra Madre mountain range in the north and ends in Batangas province in the south.

When is the Big One coming? No one knows for sure, but experts say a major quake from the fault’s movement occurs every 400 to 600 years. The last one happened in 1658.