Papua New Guinea’s National Disaster Center said more than 2,000 people were buried by the massive avalanche that devastated a remote town in the north of the country on Friday morning (24).
According to a letter from this center, dated this Sunday (26), and sent to the UN coordinator in the country, to which the EFE Agency had access this Monday (27), “more than 2,000 people were buried alive” by the “huge avalanche ” which occurred near the Porgera gold mine in the Enga province in the north of the country.
The avalanche, which occurred at 3am on Friday (2pm on Thursday in Brasília), “caused great destruction of buildings and fields and had a major impact on the country’s economic livelihood”, detailed the letter, adding that the main road access to the Porgera mine “is completely blocked”.
“The situation remains unstable as the landslide continues slowly, which still poses a danger to rescuers and survivors,” the letter warned.
UN sources consulted by EFE reported the difficulty of accurately determining the number of dead and missing due, in part, to the laborious rescue operation due to the instability of the terrain and difficult access to the area.
Data this Sunday from the International Organization for Migration (IOM), which has six workers in the disaster area, estimated the number of those buried at 670, admitting that “the hope of finding them alive is fading”.
The avalanche, which reportedly hit 150 homes, also displaced around a thousand people, according to the same agency.
The collapse of part of a mountain on Friday morning hit the city of Kaokalam, about 600 kilometers from the country’s capital, Port Moresby, burying houses with a layer between six and eight meters deep.
The affected area often suffers from intense rains and floods, and landslides are not uncommon in the country, where, despite the wealth of natural resources, a large part of its more than nine million inhabitants live in extreme poverty and are isolated due to a lack of communications and infrastructure, especially in remote locations such as the current catastrophe.
Papua New Guinea is located on the so-called Pacific Ring of Fire, an area of great seismic and volcanic activity that is shaken by around 7,000 earthquakes a year, most of them moderate.
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