The UN believes more than 670 people have been killed in a slide in New England
The disaster of Port Moresby to Wabag: Chief of staff of the National Disaster Center and Defense Minister Billy Joseph, secretary of the ministry of the country
Billy Joseph, the defense minister of the country, flew from Port Moresby to Wabag on Sunday with the director of the National Disaster Center to get a firsthand look at what needs to be done.
“There will be some support, but it’s such a spread-out area that I think it will be quite a challenging situation,” McMahon said. The scale of this disaster is tremendous.
McMahon said there were other health facilities in the region, the provincial government was sending health workers and the World Health Organization was mobilizing staff.
The number of injured and missing was assessed on Sunday. The seven people who received medical treatment by Saturday had no information on their conditions.
The International Organization for Migration is taking a leading role in the international response and has not altered its official death toll due to new evidence.
The revised death toll was based on the calculations of the village and provincial officials, Serhan Aktoprak said. 60 homes was the previous estimate.
Tambitanis village, a devastated village of Papua New Guinea, has seen more than 670 killed in a landslide
Emergency responders were moving survivors to safer ground on Sunday, as tons of unstable earth and tribal warfare were threatening the rescue effort.
On either side of the enormous amount of debris, there was a safer place for people to flee and the main highway through the province had been cut.
Beside the blocked highway, convoys that have transported food, water and other essential supplies since Saturday to the devastated village 60 kilometers (35 miles) from the provincial capital, Wabag, have faced risks related to tribal fighting in Tambitanis village, about halfway along the route. Papua New Guinea soldiers were providing security for the convoys.
Eight locals were killed in a clash between two rival clans on Saturday in a longstanding dispute unrelated to the landslide. Around 30 homes and 5 retail businesses were destroyed in the fighting.
Aktoprak said he did not expect tribal combatants would target the convoys but noted that opportunistic criminals might take advantage of the mayhem to do so.
“This could basically end up in carjacking or robbery,” Aktoprak said. The security of the personnel and goods is jeopardized because they may be used as a way to steal.
An official estimate that more than 4,000 people lived in the village when a part of Mount Mungalo fell has been cast into doubt by decades of tribal warfare.
CARE International explains the situation at the Lae disaster scene in Papua New Guinea with a heavy-mowing excavating machinery
Justine McMahon, country director of the humanitarian agency CARE International, said moving survivors to “more stable ground” was an immediate priority along with providing them with food, water and shelter. The military was in charge of that.
The United States and Australia, a near neighbor and Papua New Guinea’s most generous provider of foreign aid, are among governments that have publicly stated their readiness to do more to help responders.
Traumatized villagers are divided over whether heavy machinery should be allowed to dig up and potentially further damage the bodies of their buried relatives, officials said.
Earth-moving equipment used by Papua New Guinea’s military was being transported to the disaster scene 400 kilometers (250 miles) from the east coast city of Lae.
Mana’s office posted a photo of him at Yambali handing a local official a check for 500,000 kina ($130,000) to buy emergency supplies for the 4,000 displaced survivors.
An excavator donated by a local builder Sunday became the first piece of heavy earth-moving machinery brought in to help villagers who have been digging with shovels and farming tools to find bodies. It is difficult to work around the debris.
The situation remains unstable, and is posing ongoing danger to the rescue teams and survivors alike, according to the United Nations.
Relief workers are going to have a difficult time getting to the area since the road is 20 to 26 feet deep under the debris.
It is extremely difficult to determine the size of the disaster due to challenging conditions on the ground, a lack of telecommunications and tribal warfare, and military escort required for aid convoys.
A U.N. official has not responded to the Prime Minister’s request for an explanation of the number of killed in the Papua New Guinea landslide
A request for an explanation of the government’s estimate of 2,000 was not answered by the office of the Prime Minister.
MELBOURNE, Australia — A Papua New Guinea government official has told the United Nations more than 2,000 people were believed to have been buried alive by Friday’s landslide and has formally asked for international help.
Estimates of the casualties have varied widely since the disaster, and it was not immediately clear how many people were affected.
Serhan Aktoprak, the U.N. agency’s chief of mission in Port Moresby, said they can’t comment on what the government suggests.