Melbourne, Australia – The government of Papua New Guinea said this a landslide on Friday more than 2,000 people buried alive. International assistance was formally requested.
The government figure is about three times as high a United Nations estimate of 670.
So far, the remains of only six people have been recovered.
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A once bustling village in Enga province was nearly wiped out early Friday morning when a section of Mount Mungalo collapsed, burying houses and the people who slept in them.
In a letter to the UN coordinator dated Sunday and seen by numerous news agencies, the acting director of the South Pacific island nation’s National Disaster Center said the landslide “buried more than 2,000 people alive” and caused “major devastation ”.
The landslide caused “major destruction to buildings and food gardens and caused a major impact on the country’s economic lifeline,” the letter said, according to Agence France-Presse.
The letter also stated that the main road to the Porgera gold mine was “completely blocked”.
Estimates of the number of victims have varied widely since the disaster occurred, and it was not immediately clear how officials arrived at the new number of people affected.
Australia prepared Monday to send planes and other equipment to help at the landslide site, as overnight rains in the country’s mountainous interior raised fears that the tons of rubble the villagers buried could become dangerously unstable.
Australian Defense Minister Richard Marles said his officials have been talking to their counterparts in Papua New Guinea since Friday, when the landslide occurred.
“The exact nature of the support we provide will become clear in the coming days,” Marles told the Australian Broadcasting Corp.
“We clearly have airlift capacity to get people there. There may be other equipment that we can deploy in terms of search and rescue (and other things)… which we are now talking to PNG about,” Marles added.
Papua New Guinea is Australia’s closest neighbor and the countries are developing closer defense ties as part of an Australian effort to counter China’s growing influence in the region. Australia is also the most generous provider of foreign aid to its former colony, which gained independence in 1975.
In the provincial capital Wabag, 56 kilometers from the destroyed village, heavy rain fell for two hours overnight. There was no immediate weather report available from Yambali, where communications are limited.
But emergency responders were concerned about the rain’s impact on the already unstable mass of debris that lay 20 to 26 feet deep over an area the size of three to four football fields.
An excavator donated by a local builder became the first piece of heavy earth-moving equipment deployed on Sunday to help villagers digging with shovels and farm implements to find bodies. Working around the still-moving debris is treacherous.
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Serhan Aktoprak, head of the UN’s International Organization for Migration mission in Papua New Guinea, said water was seeping between the rubble and the earth beneath it, raising the risk of a further landslide.
He said he expected to learn about the weather conditions in Yambali only on Monday afternoon.
“What really concerns me personally is the weather, the weather, the weather,” Aktoprak said. “Because the land is still sliding. Rocks are falling,” he said.
Papua New Guinea’s Defense Minister Billy Joseph and National Disaster Center Director Laso Mana flew in an Australian military helicopter on Sunday from the capital Port Moresby to Yambali, 600 kilometers to the northwest, to escape the to get a first-hand perspective of what’s going on. needed.
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Mana’s office posted a photo of him in Yambali handing a local official a check for 500,000 kina ($130,000) to buy emergency supplies for the 4,000 displaced survivors.
Earth-moving equipment used by the Papua New Guinea army was transported to the disaster site, 400 kilometers from the east coast city of Lae.
Traumatized villagers are divided over whether heavy machinery should be allowed to dig up and possibly further damage the bodies of their buried relatives, officials said.
