Name: Papua New Guinea landslide threatens thousands more as hopes for survivors fade | BBC News
Uploaded: 2024-05-31T10:45:58.000Z
Duration: 6 min 54 s
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Papua New Guinea next and the government there says nearly 8,000 people are at risk from further landslides after a mountainside collapsed in Enga province on Friday. Hundreds of people were buried in the landslip and conditions are getting worse. Now I want to show you some pictures that we've had in from the United Nations Development Programme. Take a look at this. They really show you the scale of what's happened in the Pacific island nation. Now the provincial administrator said that the mountain you can see there was still breaking up and the continuous movement of that rock and debris was making it difficult for rescue teams to operate. Now locals are doing what they can are having to use small spades and whatever they can find to try and search through the rubble. Now rescuers say it is increasingly unlikely that victims will be found alive. The country's disaster agency says it fears that around 2,000 people were buried when that mountainside collapsed last Friday in the early hours of the morning. Residents in the village in the remote Enga region have been mourning those who have died. The UN is sending health professionals to the area amid concerns about water safety and hazards caused by decaying bodies. Australia is dispatching a team of technical experts to provide assistance.

Well this woman has been unable to find several members of her family.

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I have 18 of my family members buried under the debris and soil that I'm standing on and a lot more family members in the village I cannot count. I am the landowner here but I cannot retrieve the bodies so I'm standing here helplessly. Well let's speak now to Chris Jensen from World Vision who is in Papua New Guinea. Thank you very much for joining us on BBC News.

I just wondered if you could give us the latest as far as you know from the scene.

Yeah thank you. Yeah we've had assessment teams go in yesterday and then following up again this morning so the updates today are that there are as you've mentioned nearly 8,000 people.

It's 7,489 people live in that area who've been impacted by this landslide and there's approximately 1,427 households that have been impacted. There's an increasingly challenging aspect to come up with the numbers of people deceased. You see some of the footage there, this is metres and metres of rock and dirt which is just tragic and devastating for those people impacted. I can't imagine what that would be like but trying to dig through that amount of soil and dirt to find who's there is tragic. For us in World Vision we're really interested in the children.

They need urgent care and support and this landslide has buried up to thousands of people and we're doing all we can to get into it. I think when I start to think about this you're looking at a landslide that that fell at three o'clock in the morning so literally in the middle of the dark in this beautiful pristine valley in the upper highlands region of Papua New Guinea, the mountain just collapses on these households and on these people. So tragic events here in Enger Province and it's devastating.

Because it is so remote I'm assuming you're having real difficulty getting aid in there and indeed we've seen those pictures of people just using spades to try and lift huge boulders and getting heavy machinery in there to help that is going to be difficult.

Absolutely. Where this landslide is about 60 kilometres from Wabag is the capital of Enger Province that's on the Porgyra Highway. The challenge is that the landslides come across the road so even getting vehicle access in there or if you could get heavy equipment in to move some of that soil it's really challenging. I think the other thing is as has been mentioned there's real concern of ongoing landslides. We don't know exactly how stable some of this the mountain is that's still there. We still are seeing rainfall which could then in turn move some of this soil even further down the mountain. So it is really a complex long-term challenge. As you've heard from the lady there speaking just a tragic event where culturally people really need a process of mourning their dead and this is such a cruel disaster because it's taken away the access to the body of the deceased people. So as that lady was saying she's just watching on helplessly you know and it's incredible scenes. I think that credit to these local people they're doing what they can with the resources they have.

For us in the international community we've seen huge amounts of resources being mobilised, assistance coming in from Port Moresby, assistance coming in from New Zealand Government, from the Australian Government, from many other many other UN agencies. We are coordinating, we're connecting, we've seen massive amounts of assessments done and now we need to start bringing in the care that's required. In terms of that we need to get on with food, shelter, particularly non-food items. I think thinking about the fact that people have lost everything.

This mountain has just crushed these homes under metres of rock. This is the upper Highlands region in Papua New Guinea is a very cold region overnight. So this is not the tropical paradise of the Pacific. This is you know a really cool temperate area and so these people really have nothing. They've lost it all so we need to actually be getting the right medical care into that.

 Hygiene kits as well as you know psychosocial support. There's a lot of assistance particularly for children's needs if those have been impacted by this event. You could imagine, only imagine that the ongoing challenge of people to then come back to their own land, the place where they belong and you know the question is going to be now where are they going to live? And it's very difficult for people in PNG to relocate. This creates a lot of challenges around control and use of land. We've seen tribal fights happen in Inga over these sorts of issues in the past so we're really concerned about that. We're working with the authorities to make sure that we can reduce this kind of conflict. Okay Chris Jensen, good luck with that. Thank you very much for joining us from Papua New Guinea. That's Chris Jensen from World Vision.

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Papua New Guinea landslide threatens thousands more as hopes for survivors fade | BBC News

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