Race to save stranded villagers

Emergency services are racing to reach villages hit by a massive landslide in Papua New Guinea’s remote Enga province, where hundreds of people are feared dead.

A rapid response team of doctors and soldiers managed to reach the isolated landslide site, aid agency Care Australia said.

Difficult terrain and damage to main roads complicated their journey to the region, he added in a statement.

“The terrain continues to slide and move, making operations dangerous for people,” UN official Serhan Aktoprak told AFP.

The landslide buried hundreds of homes in the Enga Highlands, north of the southwest Pacific island nation, around 3 a.m. local time Friday (5 p.m. GMT Thursday).

Residents in surrounding areas described how trees and debris from a collapsed mountainside buried parts of the community, leaving it isolated.

Road access to the area has been blocked, making helicopters the only way to reach the area, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported.

Footage from the scene shows residents pulling bodies under rubble and trees as they cross the terrain, covered in giant boulders and uprooted trees.

It is still unknown how many people are trapped under the rubble.

“Although the area is not densely populated, we are concerned that the death toll may be disproportionate,” Care Australia said in an earlier statement.

Amos Akem, MP for Enga province, said that according to information gathered on the ground, “the landslide buried more than 300 people and 1,182 houses.”

Quoted by the Guardian newspaper, Akem said relief efforts were hampered by a blocked road linking the affected village of Yambali and the capital.

Yambali is located about 50 km from Wabag, the provincial capital.

Speaking to the AP news agency, Mr Aktoprak – who is the head of the UN International Organization for Migration mission in Papua New Guinea – said the area affected by the landslide of land covered the size of three to four football fields.

Yambali village, he added, is home to 3,895 people.

Some houses in the village were spared by the landslide, Mr Aktoprak said, but “given the scale of the disaster”, the death toll could be more than 100.

Speaking on Friday, Papua New Guinea Prime Minister James Marape said authorities were responding to the disaster.

He said the government was working with local authorities to provide “relief works, recovery of bodies and reconstruction of infrastructure”.

A resident of a nearby village said that when he arrived at the scene, “there were no more houses.”

Speaking to Australian broadcaster ABC, Dominic Lau said everything was “just flat with dirt”.

“There was nothing, just rocks and dirt… there was no people and there were no houses to be seen,” Mr Lau added.

Enga Governor Peter Ipatas told AFP that “six villages” had been affected by the landslide, which he called an “unprecedented natural disaster”.

Enga is more than 600 km by road from the country’s capital, Port Moresby.

The Papua New Guinea Red Cross Society earlier said an emergency response team comprising officials from the provincial governor’s office, police, defense forces and local NGOs had been deployed on the site.