Papua New Guinea’s prime minister James Marape has blamed “extraordinary rainfall” and changes to weather patterns for multiple disasters in the Pacific Island nation this year, including a landslide last week which may have killed thousands.
Parts of a mountain in the Maip-Mulitaka area in Enga province in PNG’s north collapsed in the early hours of last Friday and Marape said more than 2,000 people are estimated to have died, with up to 70,000 people living in the area affected by the disaster.
“Our people in that village went to sleep for the last time, not knowing they would breathe their last breath as they were sleeping peacefully. Nature threw a disastrous landslip, submerged or covered the village,” Marape told parliament on Wednesday.
Estimates of the death toll from Friday’s landslide have differed over recent days, with some local officials estimating the number to be much lower than that given by Marape.
Natural disasters have cost the country more than 500m kina ($126m) this year, before the landslide at Enga, he said.
“This year, we had extraordinary rainfall that has caused flooding in river areas, sea level rise in coastal areas and landslips in a few areas,” Marape said.
“We have faced extraordinary weather patterns and changes from dryness to wetness,” he added.
Deputy prime minister John Rosso said: “The climate change effects that are here now is not just in Enga, for the last two months we have seen unprecedented disasters throughout the country.”
The comments came as an aid worker said an entire village had been buried in the Enga landslide.
“It’s basically a mountain that has fallen on their heads,” said Mate Bagossy, who is with the UN development programme helping relief efforts in remote Yambali in the northern Enga Province.
“It’s an entire village and shops and a fuel station and a lodge and the church and the school … all of that has gone,” said Bagossy, who was one of the first foreign aid workers to arrive at the village earlier this week.
The Pacific country, which lies just north of Australia, regularly experiences landslides and natural disasters but the latest landslide is one of the most devastating it has seen in recent years.
Defence minister Billy Joseph was travelling to the scene of the landslide on Wednesday with relief supplies provided by Australia, the government said. Military personnel from Australia and New Zealand would help with the relief and reconstruction.
PNG on Wednesday ramped up rescue efforts, while authorities raised concerns about the outbreak of diseases amid warnings of further landslides. Thousands of people have been ordered to evacuate amid further earth slips in the mountain.
Residents have been using shovels and bare hands to dig through mud and debris almost two storeys high, even as officials said chances of finding survivors were slim. Rescue teams have been slow to reach the site because of the treacherous terrain and tribal unrest in the remote area, forcing the military to escort convoys of relief teams.
On Tuesday, Enga province disaster committee chairperson Sandis Tsaka told Reuters the landslide area remained “very unstable.”
“When we’re up there, we’re regularly hearing big explosions where the mountain is, there are still rocks and debris coming down,” Tsaka said.
Nicholas Booth, resident representative at the United Nations Development Programme, said the relief operation was extraordinarily complicated as the terrain continued to move.
“It means that now, the area that’s been affected by the landslide is greater than it was at the beginning. We don’t know how it will develop, but that’s the nature of the geology in PNG,” he said.
Water running underneath the rubble was making the area uneven and response efforts had to be done in a very careful manner, he said.
A long-running tribal conflict has made it harder for aid workers to access the site, Booth said. Eight people were killed and 30 houses torched in fighting on Saturday.
A total of 150 structures were estimated to have been buried by the landslide.
The landslide had hit a section of highway near the Porgera goldmine, operated by Barrick Gold through Barrick Niugini, its joint venture with China’s Zijin Mining. The miner said its operations were not affected.
Marape said the government was working with Barrick to reopen the road. Barrick said it had offered the government more heavy equipment at the slip site.
The United Nations, in its latest update, said a bridge had collapsed on Tuesday on the main road toward the disaster area, potentially delaying rescue teams reaching the site.
The UN migration agency has warned of an outbreak of infectious diseases if immediate steps are not taken.
“Every passing minute, bodies buried under the debris are decaying, with water squeezed between the ground and the vast debris covering an area of three to four football fields is continuing to leak, this is posing a high health risk,” Serhan Aktoprak, the chief of the agency’s mission in PNG said in an emailed statement.
With Reuters and Associated Press
