Papua New Guinea landslide: Race to rescue villagers trapped

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

A rapid response team made up of medics and military personnel has managed to reach the isolated landslide site, humanitarian agency Care Australia said.

Difficult terrain and damage to main roads has complicated their journey to the area, it added in a statement.

“The land continues to slide and move, and that makes it dangerous for people to operate,” UN official Serhan Aktoprak told AFP news agency.

The landslide buried hundreds of homes in the highlands of Enga, in the north of the island nation in the south-west Pacific, at around 03:00 local time on Friday (17:00 GMT on Thursday).

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

Highway 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 locals pulling bodies from beneath rubble and trees as they traverse the terrain, covered by giant boulders and uprooted trees.

It remains unclear how many people are trapped under the rubble.

“While the area is not densely populated, our concern is that the death toll could be disproportionately high,” Care Australia said in an earlier statement.

Amos Akem, an Enga province MP, said that based on reports from the ground, “the landslide buried more than 300 people and 1,182 houses”.

Quoted by the Guardian newspaper, Mr Akem explained that rescue efforts have been hampered by a blocked road connecting the affected Yambali village and the capital.

Yambali is located some 50km (31 miles) from Wabag, the province’s capital.

Speaking to AP news agency, Mr Aktoprak – who is the UN’s International Organization for Migration’s mission in Papua New Guinea’s chief – said the area affected by the landslide 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 might be higher than 100.

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

He said the government is working with local officials to provide “relief work, recovery of bodies, and reconstruction of infrastructure”.

A resident from a nearby village said that when he arrived at the scene, “there was no houses [left]”.

Speaking to Australian broadcaster ABC, Dominic Lau said it was all “just flat with soil”.

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

Enga’s governor Peter Ipatas told AFP as many as “six villages” had been affected by the landslide, which he described as an “unprecedented natural disaster”.

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

Papua New Guinea’s Red Cross Society earlier said an emergency response team made up of officials from the provincial governor’s office, police, defence forces, and local NGOs had been deployed to the site.