Help Slow to Come, Nearly a Week After PNG Quake
For nearly a week, Isaac Pulupe and seven of his family members have been living under a bit of canvas stretched between the remnants of his house, with little food, dirty water and no electricity.
Mr Pulupe lives in Tari, a town in the Papua New Guinea Highlands close to the epicentre of a magnitude 7.5 earthquake which struck in the early hours of Monday.
Tari, the capital of Hela Province, has borne the brunt of its fury, but for days that was difficult to ascertain, with most communication links cut off.
Mobile phone coverage has been gradually restored and in a phone interview on Saturday, Mr Pulupe said the scale of devastation in the town of 10,000 was immense. Most of its buildings had collapsed, he said, including schools and parts of the hospital.
“Most people have been traumatised emotionally from all that is happening and the continual earthquakes going on,” he said. “Most people, their gardens and even homes have been collapsed.” Most of the town was now living in tents, under tarpaulins, or ramshackle huts built from the rubble, which sometimes toppled in the near constant aftershocks that have rattled the region for five days now.
There was no electricity, food supplies were running out, and water had been contaminated by landslides further upstream. Mr Pulupe said he was not sure of the number of casualties in the town, but it was believed to be in the dozens. Nearly a week after the earthquake, the town - which is completely cut off from the outside world, with roads blocked by collapsed mountain sides, and the airport’s runway ruptured - is yet to see any aid.
“We’ve heard that there are international charity organisations committed to come to help us, but we haven’t seen them yet,” Mr Pulupe said.
“We only have the provincial government team trying to go around doing the assessments.” That’s not unique to Tari. For much of the region affected along the Hela-Southern Highlands border, aid is only starting to trickle in and a picture of what the earthquake did is only starting to emerge.