CNN
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A massive landslide in Papua New Guinea last week is feared to have buried as many as 2,000 people, according to the country's National Disaster Centre, and survivors have described the horror of losing many loved ones.
The landslide hit the Enga mountain region of northern Papua New Guinea on Friday, and the latest number of missing people is a significant increase from previous estimates.
Local residents are reeling as tonnes of rocks and mud have been forced into their homes while they slept. Rescue teams are struggling to reach such remote areas in what is already one of Asia's poorest countries, leaving locals with no option but to dig their way through the collapsed mountainsides with hand tools.
Ebit Kambu said he lost more than a dozen family members in the disaster.
“There are 18 family members buried under the rubble and soil where I am standing, and countless more in the village,” she told Reuters. “I am the landowner here but I have not been able to recover the bodies and so I stand here helpless.”
Mohamed Omer/International Organization for Migration/AP
Villagers search the site of a landslide in Yambari, Papua New Guinea highlands, Sunday, May 26, 2024.
Local community leader Miok Michael told CNN that there were probably only a few survivors. “People are coming together to mourn,” he said. “People have been digging up bodies since day one, but they can't find them because they're covered by huge boulders. They can only be found with machines.”
Shortly after the disaster, the United Nations said the death toll could reach 100. The International Organization for Migration (IOM) mission to the country later revised that figure upwards to 670.
But the latest projections from Papua New Guinea's disaster management agency suggest that may be a significant underestimate.
“The landslides buried more than 2,000 people alive, caused extensive damage to buildings and gardens and dealt a major blow to the country's economic infrastructure,” Lusete Raso Mana, acting director of the National Disaster Centre, said in a letter to the UN.
“The situation remains unstable as the landslide continues to move slowly, posing a continuing risk to both rescue teams and survivors,” he added, saying the main highway into the area had been completely cut off by the landslide.
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Chris Jensen, World Vision's Papua New Guinea director, told CNN that rescue workers were “clear about the extent of the damage.”
“This is a massive landslide. It's absolutely astonishing. Literally an entire mountain came crashing down on so many homes in the middle of the night.”
“We have to be very careful with how we respond now because we can't afford to have any more issues with the land,” Jensen said.
“The death toll is still unknown as only a few bodies have been recovered,” said Justin McMahon, Papua New Guinea director for the international humanitarian group CARE International.
“Officials have responded very effectively and quickly and are working around the clock, but given the scale of this disaster and the number of people affected, they will need funding from the wider relief community,” McMahon told CNN.
She added: “The big challenge today was that the ground was still quite unstable.”
“It will be difficult to reach some of the victims given that the homes are buried under up to eight metres (more than 26 feet) of dirt,” McMahon said.
01:20 – Source: CNN
Aerial footage shows aftermath of massive landslide in Papua New Guinea
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Serhan Aktpurak of the UN agency International Organisation for Migration (IOM) told Reuters that teams on the ground were “using digging sticks, shovels, forks and our own hands to try to salvage what we can”.
The landslide struck the remote village of Kaokalam, about 600 km northwest of the capital Port Moresby, at about 3 a.m. local time on Friday, leaving a trail of rubble the size of four football fields that humanitarian workers said.
More than 150 homes in the village of Yambari were buried under rubble, authorities said Sunday, and the area remains “extremely dangerous” as rocks continue to fall and the ground is under ever-increasing pressure, they said.
Papua New Guinea is home to about 10 million people, and vast mountainous terrain and a lack of roads make it difficult to access the affected areas.
Pierre Rognon, an associate professor in the University of Sydney's school of civil engineering, said finding survivors after the landslide would be “particularly challenging” for rescuers.
“Landslides can result in collapsed buildings and people being buried under tens of metres of geological material,” he said.
“To make matters worse, earthquakes can shift buildings, trapping people for hundreds of metres. No one can predict exactly where survivors are or where to start searching.”
The cause of the landslide is unclear, but Alan Collins, a professor of geology at the University of Adelaide, said it occurred in an area that has seen “significant rainfall”.
“The landslides don't appear to be directly caused by the earthquakes, but frequent earthquakes caused by plate collisions can create steep slopes and tall mountains that can become very unstable,” Collins said.
He said rainfall could have changed the minerals that make up the bedrock, weakening the rocks that make up the steep hillsides.
“Vegetation mitigates this as tree roots stabilise the ground, but deforestation can destroy the biological web and make landslides more frequent,” he said.
“We need to find out what's causing this,” World Vision's Jensen said.
“There are no reports of earthquakes at this time, however there is significant rainfall across Papua New Guinea and unseasonable weather,” Jensen said.
“Other states are experiencing flooding and have a lot of challenges that are exacerbated by climate change, so we'll be doing further assessment and analysis and trying to figure out what's causing this.”
