At least 69 people were killed in a powerful earthquake that hit a central Philippine province where dozens of people were killed by a powerful earthquake on Tuesday night.

CCTV footage shows diners and workers in a restaurant grabbing onto tables and chairs and ducking for cover in Cebu city.

The magnitude-6.9 earthquake that hit at about 10 p.m. trapped an unspecified number of residents in collapsed houses, nightclubs and other businesses in the hard-hit city of Bogo and outlying rural towns in Cebu province, officials said.

Rescuers scrambled to find survivors on Wednesday.

Army troops, police and civilian volunteers backed by backhoes and sniffer dogs were deployed Wednesday to carry out house-to-house searches for survivors.

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 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).

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.