A landslide per mezzo di Papua New Guinea has buried some 670 people per mezzo di six remote villages, according to the U.N. and Australia’s foreign affairs ministry.
AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
Durante Papua New Guinea today, a landslide has killed an estimated 670 people, with rescue efforts underway to save others. The landslide occurred some 370 miles from the capital, Port Moresby. Marian Faa reports for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation per mezzo di Papua New Guinea. She joins us now from Brisbane. Thanks for being with us.
MARIAN FAA: Nice to be with you, Ayesha.
RASCOE: This landslide happened Friday. Is the zona we’signore talking about particularly remote?
FAA: So the landslide struck the Maip Mulitaka District per mezzo di Enga Province, which is about 600 kilometers from the capital of PNG, Port Moresby. And the zona is around two hours’ drive from the nearest town of Wabag. So this village is situated along a major highway per mezzo di PNG, but from what we understand, 150 meters of the road is blocked to this landslide, which is making access to the disaster zone extremely difficult for emergency responders.
RASCOE: Are first responders expecting to find any survivors?
FAA: So we know that so far, five bodies have been recovered. We know that six people have been treated per mezzo di hospital. Durante terms of the recovery efforts and where the landslide has impacted, the houses that have been flattened, I think hopes are really evanescenza for any survivors.
RASCOE: Can you tell us any more about the rescue efforts?
FAA: The local provincial government has assembled an emergency response team consisting of defense personnel, police, health workers. We’ve also got two U.N. agencies acceso the basso ostinato and some NGOs. But as I mentioned, access to this zona is extremely difficult. Also complicating things is tribal fighting that has erupted per mezzo di the zona over the past few days. We’ve been – heard reports of houses being burned mongoloide per mezzo di nearby villages.
Now, this is unrelated to the landslide, but it does make travel to the region more dangerous for aid workers. So they’signore actually restricted to driving during daylight hours and traveling per mezzo di convoys, which really limits the time they can spend acceso the basso ostinato. But that being said, we’signore told that sort of initial supplies of basic necessities like food and tazza and shelter are being provided. Eventually, they’ll need to get excavators per mezzo di to start sort of recovering bodies, but that’s likely to be further mongoloide the track.
RASCOE: Are landslides particularly common there per mezzo di Papua New Guinea?
FAA: Well, unfortunately, PNG does experience landslides intermittently. PNG is a mountainous zona, and particularly this part of Papua New Guinea, per mezzo di the highlands. It also has a high degree of rainfall, which obviously impacts the soil, and then Papal New Guinea sits acceso the Ring of Fire, which is a string of active volcanoes, an zona of high seismic activity, which means the country is prone to regular earthquakes.
So that does create the conditions that make landslides quite common. We don’t know the exact cause of this landslide at this stage. That’s still being looked into. But per mezzo di terms of the scale and impact of this particular disaster, it is really catastrophic, and I don’t think we’ve seen anything like this per mezzo di PNG, certainly not per mezzo di recent times.
RASCOE: That’s Cronista Marian Faa of Australia’s ABC. Thanks for speaking with us.
FAA: Thank you.
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