Short answer. Under Article 324 of the Revised Penal Code, causing destruction by explosion that endangers the safety of any person is punished by reclusion temporal — imprisonment of twelve years and one day to twenty years. When no person's safety is endangered, the lighter penalty of prisión mayor applies.
What the law says
Any person who shall cause destruction by means of explosion, discharge of electric current, inundation, sinking or stranding of a vessel, intentional damaging of the engine of said vessel, taking up the rails from a railway track, maliciously changing railway signals for the safety of moving trains, destroying telegraph wires and telegraph posts, or those of any other system, and, in general, by using any other agency or means of destruction as effective as those above enumerated, shall be punished by reclusion temporal if the commission has endangered the safety of any person; otherwise, the penalty of prision mayor shall be imposed.
Revised Penal Code, Article 324 — Crimes Involving Destruction. Read the full provision →
Two tiers of penalty depending on danger to persons
Article 324 of the Revised Penal Code draws the penalty line at one fact: whether the destructive act endangered the safety of any person. If it did, the penalty is reclusion temporal — twelve years and one day to twenty years. If no person's safety was endangered — if the destruction affected only property with no risk to anyone's physical safety — the penalty is prisión mayor, which runs from six years and one day to twelve years. The same act of destruction, identical in method and result, carries a dramatically different penalty depending on whether people were put at risk.
The means of destruction covered by Article 324
Article 324 enumerates specific methods: explosion, discharge of electric current, inundation, sinking or stranding of a vessel, intentional damaging of a vessel's engine, taking up rails from a railway track, maliciously changing railway signals, and destroying telegraph wires and posts. The statute then extends the coverage with a catch-all: any other agency or means of destruction as effective as those above enumerated. This open-ended formulation means the article is not limited to the listed technologies. Any method that achieves destruction with comparable effectiveness falls within its scope.
What 'endangering the safety of any person' means
The higher penalty applies when the commission of the act has endangered the safety of any person. This requires that at least one identifiable person was placed at risk of physical harm by the destructive act. It does not require that anyone was actually injured — endangerment is enough. If an explosion occurs in a completely uninhabited and isolated area with no possibility of any person being harmed, the lighter penalty may apply. But if the explosion occurs near people, inside a structure where people could be present, or in circumstances where anyone might be at risk, the endangerment element is likely satisfied.
Overlap with other offenses
Depending on the circumstances, a particular act of destruction may also fall under other provisions of the Revised Penal Code or under special laws such as those governing the use of explosives. When an act involves both destruction under Article 324 and another offense — for example, when the destruction is combined with arson or causes actual injury or death — the applicable rules on complex crimes, special complex crimes, or absorption may determine how the charges are filed and how the penalties are computed. Article 324 describes destruction as the core offense; additional consequences are governed by whichever provision specifically addresses them.