It was 10 minutes past midnight of August 17, 1976, a Tuesday.

While most people were sleeping, a massive earthquake, registering magnitude 8.0 on the Richter scale, rocked most of Mindanao and parts of the Visayas.

The tremor was most strongly felt in the cities and towns surrounding the Moro Gulf, particularly in Cotabato City, which now hosts the regional center of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM).

What made the 1976 Moro Gulf Quake most devastating, however, was not just the degree of the earth shaking. READ MORE