Authorities fear a second landslide and a disease outbreak are looming at the scene of Papua New Guinea’s mass-casualty disaster because of water streams and bodies trapped beneath the tons of debris that swept over a village, a United Nations official said Tuesday.
A mass of boulders, earth and splintered trees devastated Yambali in the South Pacific nation’s remote highlands when a limestone mountainside sheared away Friday. The blanket of debris has become more unstable with recent rain and streams trapped between the ground and rubble, said Serhan Aktoprak, chief of the International Organization for Migration’s mission in Papua New Guinea.
The UN agency has officials at the scene in Enga province helping shelter 1,600 displaced people. The agency estimates 670 villagers died, while Papua New Guinea’s government has told the United Nations it thinks more than 2,000 people were buried. Five bodies had been retrieved from the rubble by Monday.
“We are hearing suggestions that another landslide can happen and maybe 8,000 people need to be evacuated,” Aktoprak told The Associated Press.
“This is a major concern. The movement of the land, the debris, is causing a serious risk, and overall the total number of people that may be affected might be 6,000 or more,” he said. That includes villagers whose source of clean drinking water has been buried and subsistence farmers who lost their vegetable gardens.
“If this debris mass is not stopped, if it continues moving, it can gain speed and further wipe out other communities and villages further down” the mountain, Aktoprak said.
Scenes of villagers digging with their bare hands through muddy debris in search of their relatives’ remains were also concerning.
“My biggest fear at the moment is that corpses are decaying, … water is flowing and this is going to pose serious health risks in relation to contagious diseases,” Aktoprak said.
It is “very unlikely” more survivors of Papua New Guinea’s deadly landslide will be found, another UN agency warned Tuesday, as thousands of residents at risk from further slips were warned to evacuate.
“It is not a rescue mission, it is a recovery mission,” UNICEF Papua New Guinea’s Niels Kraaier told AFP. “It is very unlikely they will have survived.”
Aktoprak’s agency was raising those concerns at a disaster management virtual meeting of national and international responders Tuesday.
The warning comes as geotechnical experts and heavy earth-moving equipment are expected to reach the site soon.
The Papua New Guinea government on Sunday officially asked the United Nations for additional help and to coordinate contributions from individual nations.
An Australian disaster response team was scheduled to arrive Tuesday in Papua New Guinea, which is Australia’s nearest neighbor. It will include a geohazard assessment team and drones to help map the site.
“Their role will be particularly helping perform geotechnical surveillance to establish the level of the landslip, the instability of the land there, obviously doing some work around identifying where bodies are,” said Murray Watt, Australia’s minister for emergency management.
Australia’s minister for the Pacific, Pat Conroy, said the government would also provide long-term logistical support for clearing debris, recovering bodies and supporting displaced people. The government announced an initial aid package of 2.5 million Australian dollars ($1.7 million).
“This is an incredibly inaccessible part of Papua New Guinea and it’s a really challenging process for everyone involved,” Conroy said.
Earth-moving equipment used by Papua New Guinea’s military was expected to arrive soon, after travelling from the city of Lae, 400 kilometres (250 miles) to the east, said Justine McMahon, country director of humanitarian agency CARE International.
The landslide buried a 200-metre (650-foot) stretch of the province’s main highway. But the highway had been cleared from Yambali to the provincial capital Wabag through to Lae, officials said Tuesday from Enga.
“One of the complicating factors was the destruction of parts of the road plus the instability of the ground, but they have some confidence that they can take in heavy equipment today,” McMahon said Tuesday.
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.
Heartbroken and frustrated Yambali resident Evit Kambu thanked those who were trying to find her missing relatives in the rubble.
“I have 18 of my family members buried under the debris and soil that I’m standing on,” she told Australian Broadcasting Corp. through an interpreter.
“But I can’t retrieve the bodies, so I’m standing here helplessly,” she added.
Papua New Guinea is a diverse, developing nation with 800 languages and 10 million people who are mostly subsistence farmers.
Full-scale rescue and relief efforts have been severely hampered by the site’s remote location, heavy rainfall, nearby tribal violence and the landslide severing the only road link to the outside world.
Tribal violence
As disaster workers entered the remote disaster zone, they realised population estimates failed to account for dozens of families seeking sanctuary in the area.
Serhan Aktoprak, chief of the United Nations’ migration agency in Papua New Guinea, said the “internally displaced” Tulpar people had moved into the village “as they escaped from another tribal conflict elsewhere”.
Highland clans have fought each other in Papua New Guinea for centuries, but a recent influx of mercenaries and automatic weapons has inflamed tensions.
The Red Cross estimates as many as 30,000 people are displaced by tribal violence in Papua New Guinea every year.
Highlands home
Papua New Guinea has one of the least concentrated urban populations in the world.
Some 40 percent of people are thought to eschew its coastal cities in favour of highland regions in the country’s interior.
The highlands are a mix of rolling jungle mountains, dense tropical rainforests and twisting river valleys.
Nestled amongst this unforgiving terrain are some of the fastest growing and most densely packed communities in the country.
There are myriad factors that could explain this, including high rates of polygyny, falling death rates and long-formed attachments to ancestral homelands.
Most highland communities occupy a kind of “goldilocks zone”, sitting at altitudes between 1,400 metres (4,600 feet) and 2,600 metres high.
Researchers have found this helps them stave off the risk of malarial infections that run rampant through lower-lying areas.
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