Bodies pulled from Solomons tsunami rubble
Pastor Dale Morgan
Bodies pulled from Solomons tsunami rubble*
POSTED: 1621 GMT (0021 HKT), April 3, 2007
Story Highlights
• 28 dead, thousands homeless, Solomon Islands government says
• State of emergency declared in Solomon Islands
• Monday's quake was 8.1 magnitude
* Hundreds still Missing
HONIARA, Solomon Islands (AP) -- Survivors got their first boatloads of
aid in the Solomon Islands tsunami zone Tuesday as more bodies were
found amid the rubble triggered by a massive undersea earthquake.
Flights over remote coastal villages in the stricken Western Province of
the islands on Tuesday reported widespread destruction, a local official
said, as the death toll edged toward 30 and was expected to climb further.
There was still no official number for those missing more than a day
after the combination punch of a powerful earthquake and killer waves
struck on Monday morning. Thousands faced a second night sleeping
outside on the higher ground where they fled to escape a 17-foot
(5-meter) all of water.
Solomons Deputy Police Commissioner Peter Marshall said boats arrived
Tuesday morning in the towns of Gizo and in nearby Munda from Honiara,
the capital, carrying food and other urgent supplies.
Some were distributed, while planes overflew outlying areas to try to
determine where other aid was mostly urgently needed. They spotted
bodies floating in the water, as well as damaged roads and airstrips.
"There are some very ragged, remote areas and there's no connecting
roads, (just) isolated villages," Marshall told Australian Broadcasting
Corp. radio.
Julian Makaa, spokesman for the National Disaster Management Office,
said officials could only guess at the numbers of dead in the remotest
villages, where two-way radio is the usual mode of contact with the
outside world.
Television footage shot from a helicopter that overflew parts of the
coast outside Gizo, the area's main town, showed building after tin- or
thatched-roof building collapsed along a muddy foreshore. Others leaned
awkwardly on broken stilts.
The disaster also rekindled a scientific debate about whether
multimillion-dollar warning systems being installed in response to the
2004 Indian Ocean tsunami are worth the cost, or whether more money
should be spent simply on teaching people how to read the danger signs
and get to high ground more quickly.
In Gizo, some of more than 2,000 people who spent Monday night encamped
in hills behind the town after fleeing the surging waves returned
looking for supplies or loved ones.
Most of the more than one dozen bodies found Tuesday were reported by
people who discovered relatives in the remains of their shattered
houses, said Arnold Moveni, head of the provincial disaster committee.
The confirmed death toll stood at 28 in the Solomons, Moveni said, and
was expected to rise as more rubble was searched and outlying villages
reached. Five unconfirmed deaths were reported in neighboring Papua New
Guinea.
Makaa said at least 916 houses had been destroyed around Gizo and about
5,000 people affected, but that the final toll could be much higher. The
Red Cross said about 2,000 of Gizo's 7,000 people were homeless.
Officials said shortages would become dire within days without outside help.
"There is no food available" in Gizo and Noro, a nearby town, said
government spokesman Alfred Maesulia. "Some settlements have been
completely wiped out by the waves."
Outside Gizo, teams that flew over the coast reported the "destruction
was massive and widespread," said Fred Fakarii, chairman of the National
Disaster Management Council.
Among the dead were a bishop and three worshippers at a church on Simbo
island, the Uniting Chursh said. A 53-year-old New Zealand man who
drowned trying to save his mother from the waves, that country's leader
said.
Australia, New Zealand, the International Red Cross and the United
Nations were among those offering aid, but no formal relief plan was
announced after a day of meetings by senior bureaucrats and government
officials. More aerial reconnaissance was needed first, Fakarii said.
But Makaa said the airport had been cleared of debris and was expected
to be assessed on Wednesday and certified as safe to use. Six doctors
and 13 nurses would be among the first flown in to Munda and Gizo, where
the region's only hospital was inundated, he said.
Most the homeless who spent Monday night sleeping under tarpaulins or
the stars in hills behind Gizo faced a second night there on Tuesday.
Scores of aftershocks, including multiple jolts of magnitude 6 or more,
have shaken the region and many people remained to scared to return to town.
Monday's 8.1 magnitude quake struck at 7:39 a.m. six miles (10
kilometers) beneath the sea floor, about 25 miles (40 kilometers) from
Gizo, the U.S. Geological Survey said. Within five minutes, waves up to
17 feet (5 meters) high plowed into the coast, witnesses said.
U.S. earthquake expert Kerry Sieh, who has studied the Indian Ocean
disaster, said Monday's event showed warning systems were of limited
value to communities lying close to the epicenter of tsunami-causing quakes.
"When you have a tsunami coming in so quickly after an earthquake, it
doesn't do much good to have an early warning system," he said, though
he noted such systems could help communities farther away.
Officials would be better off putting more resources into disaster
response education and efforts to permanently move vulnerable
communities to higher ground, he said.
More than 200 islands with a population of about 552,000 people make up
the Solomon Islands. They lie on the Pacific Basin's so-called "Ring of
Fire," an arc of volcanos and fault lines where quakes are frequent.