Monday, December 2, 2024

‘A situation that is getting worse’: Why only six bodies of the thousands feared dead in PNG have been recovered

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The Papua New Guinea government says more than 2,000 people are believed to have been buried alive in a landslide in the South Pacific island nation.

A mountain came down in the early hours of Friday morning when the village of Yambali was asleep.

The settlement is located in a restive and remote area in the interior of PNG, making search and rescue efforts complicated and hazardous.

The remains of only six people have been recovered so far. Here’s a look at some of the challenges impeding rescuers.

Difficult access, restive population

The village of at least 4,000 — but believed to be substantially larger — is in a mountainous and forested part of Papua New Guinea’s Enga province.

It is located alongside a winding highway to the town of Porgera and a mine that has produced billions of dollars of gold but whose security personnel have been accused by rights groups of abuses.

The highway was covered by the landslide, effectively cutting off Porgera and the other villages past Yambali from the provincial capital of Wabag, some 60 kilometres from where the disaster occurred.

May 24: Satellite imagery shows the view before the landslide in Enga Province. / May 27: The view after the landslide.

Emergency responders have brought aid in from Wabag, but have had to make the final 200 meters of the journey by foot over the rubble-covered highway.

Debris up to 8 meters deep covering an area the size of three or four football fields was being cleared exclusively by hand with shovels and picks for more than two days, until an excavator donated by a local builder arrived on Sunday.

An excavator moves toward dozens of people standing on rubble

The first excavator only reached the disaster site late on Sunday, according to a UN official.(AP Photo: Mohamud Omer/International Organization for Migration)

Survivors have been hesitant to allow heavy machinery to be used because they do not want the bodies of their relatives harmed, said Serhan Aktoprak, the chief of the UN migration agency’s mission in Papua New Guinea.

The donated excavator was driven away on Monday morning, though it is not clear whether that was related to locals’ objections or for another reason, he said.

Military engineers with additional heavy equipment are being transported to the disaster scene 400 kilometres from the east coast city of Lae and are expected to arrive by Wednesday.

Deadly local feuds complicating response

Longtime tribal warfare in Enga province has not relented despite the disaster, meaning that soldiers have had to provide security for the aid convoys heading toward Yambali.

At least 49 men were killed in an ambush in February, and eight more died in a clash between two rival clans on Saturday in a longstanding dispute unrelated to the landslide.

About 30 homes and five retail businesses were burned down in the fighting, officials said.

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