Papua New Guinea orders evacuations after landslide, thousands feared
buried
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[May 28, 2024]
By Lewis Jackson and Renju Jose
SYDNEY (Reuters) -Papua New Guinea ordered thousands of residents to
evacuate from the path of a still-active landslide on Tuesday after
parts of a mountain collapsed burying at least 2,000 people, according
to government estimates.
Officials said the odds of finding survivors were slim, even as relief
teams have trickled into the difficult-to-access northern Enga region of
the Pacific nation since Friday.
Heavy equipment and aid have been slow to arrive because of the
treacherous terrain and tribal unrest in the remote area, forcing the
military to escort convoys of relief teams.
Residents have been using shovels and their bare hands to search for
survivors.
"The landslide area is very unstable. When we're up there, we're
regularly hearing big explosions where the mountain is, there are still
rocks and debris coming down," Enga province disaster committee
chairperson Sandis Tsaka told Reuters.
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Military personnel had set up checkpoints and were helping move
residents to evacuation centers, he said.
The United Nations said on Tuesday six bodies had been recovered so far
and the total affected population, including those needing possible
evacuation and relocation, was estimated at 7,849. An International
Organization for Migration official said that a bridge had collapsed on
the main highway to the site, forcing aid convoys to take a longer
route.
Papua New Guinea regularly experiences landslides and natural disasters
that rarely make headlines, but this is one of the most devastating ones
it has seen in recent years.
The government has estimated that more than 2,000 people were buried in
the landslide which occurred early Friday, sharply higher than the U.N.
figure of 670 possible deaths, and some local officials' much lower
estimates.
'COMPLICATED' RELIEF EFFORT
The relief operation was extraordinarily complicated, said Nicholas
Booth, resident representative at the United Nations Development
Program, with the terrain continuing to move.
"It means that now, the area that's been affected by the landslide is
greater than it was at the beginning. We don't know how it will develop,
but that's the nature of the geology in PNG," he said.
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![](../images/052824PIX/news_p32.jpg)
Onlookers react as people clear an area at the site of a landslide
in Yambali village, Enga Province, Papua New Guinea, May 27, 2024.
UNDP Papua New Guinea/Handout via REUTERS
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IOM's Itayi Viriri said that aid teams were having to proceed
cautiously to prevent "another disaster".
"We still have water underneath the rubble so that is making the
whole area quite uneven so it ensures all response efforts have to
be done in a very careful manner," he told a Geneva briefing.
A long-running tribal conflict has made it harder for aid workers to
access the site, Booth said. Eight people were killed and 30 houses
torched in fighting on Saturday.
A total of 150 structures were estimated to have been buried by the
landslide.
The U.N. said on Tuesday that immediate needs included clean water,
food, clothing, shelter items, kitchen utensils, medicine and
hygiene kits and psychosocial support.
Provincial authorities have requested the international community to
send engineers to carry out a geohazard assessment, the U.N. said in
a statement.
The differing fatality estimates reflect the difficulty in getting
an accurate population count. The nation's last credible census was
in 2000 and a 2022 voter roll does not include those under 18.
Such estimates should be treated with "great caution", Booth said.
"Most people remain trapped under that rubble and it's just not
possible at this stage to make a very scientific, verified
estimate," he said. "But it's going to be a very high number of
casualties. We have to be prepared for that."
(Reporting by Renju Jose, Lewis Jackson and Jill Gralow in Sydney;
writing by Praveen Menon; Editing by Michael Perry, Bernadette Baum
and Ana Nicolaci da Costa)
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