Aid starts flowing to Vanuatu as remote islands plead for help
TANNA: Aid began arriving in some of cyclonehit Vanuatu’s worst affected islands yesterday but others remain isolated, with flights over the Pacific nation showing desperate villagers spelling out the letter“H”for help.
Relief agencies are battling logistical challenges in the sprawling archipelago with a lack of landing strips and deep water ports hampering their efforts to reach distant islands and get a better grip on the full scale of the disaster. Vanuatu Prime Minister Joe Natuman, who travelled to hard-hit Tanna island on Wednesday on a New Zealand C-130 Hercules, said “it’ll be at least a week or two” before the full impact of Severe Tropical Cyclone Pam is known.
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs revised its death toll down to 11 from 24 but said it was expected to rise, while the Vanuatu government puts the toll at seven. Aid groups continued to paint a bleak picture, warning of large-scale property destruction and shortages of food and clean water.
“The yams are rotting in the mud. There’s no more bananas, fruit, anything. Pam took everything,” said Philemon Mansale, the head of a large family from Mele village outside the capital Port Vila on the main island of Efate. The southern islands of Tanna and Erromango bore the full brunt of the cyclone when it barreled in late Friday, and Oxfam, the UN and CARE Australia said assessments showed widespread devastation with entire villages destroyed.
“In Tanna at Lenakel, the provincial capital, 70 percent of houses are damaged,” CARE’s Tom Perry told AFP from Port Vila. The whole township of Waesisi on Tanna’s northeast coast was “inundated with water... and 100 percent damaged”. An AFP photographer on Tanna said the land was stripped bare of coconut trees, wells were swamped by landslides and doctors at the island’s hospital worked on patients while wading through mud-covered floors.
“I’ve never seen nothing like it, just the noise and the destruction,” said Australian tourist Andrew Brooks, who felt the cyclone’s fury as he sheltered in a makeshift evacuation centre in a school on Tanna.—AFP