At least five people were killed and an estimated 1,000 homes destroyed when a magnitude 6.9 earthquake rocked Papua New Guinea (PNG), officials said yesterday as disaster crews poured into the region.
Dozens of villages nestled on the banks of the nation’s Sepik River were already battling floods when the quake struck early on Sunday morning.
“So far, around 1,000 homes have been lost,” East Sepik Governor Allan Bird said, adding that emergency crews were “still assessing the impact” from a tremor that “damaged most parts of the province.”
Photo: AFP / Papua New Guinea Police
Provincial Police Commander Christopher Tamari said that authorities had so far recorded five deaths in the wake of the disaster.
Tamari said that, with emergency crews still venturing into the remote and jungle-clad region, the number of fatalities “could be more.”
Photographs showed damaged wooden houses with thatched roofs collapsing into the surrounding knee-high floodwaters, while an aging bridge in the provincial capital, Wewak, buckled under the strain.
Bird said that there was a pressing need to get medical supplies, clean drinking water and temporary shelter into the disaster zone.
Papua New Guinean Prime Minister James Marape has approved a US$130 million emergency funding package to help recovery efforts following “a spate of natural disasters” across the nation.
“Papua New Guinea has been recently hit hard by [the] earthquake, flooding caused by heavy rain and ensuing landslips, king tides, strong winds and others,” he said in a statement on Sunday evening following the quake.
Flooding, landslides and torrential rain earlier this month killed at least 23 people.
The Sepik River twists for hundreds of kilometers through Papua New Guinea’s East Sepik Province, flowing down from the jungle highlands and out toward the tropical coast. Largely untouched by urban development and industry, it is one of the nation’s last pristine waterways.
CARTEL ARRESTS: The president said that a US government operation to arrest two cartel members made it jointly responsible for the unrest in the state’s capital Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador on Thursday blamed the US in part for a surge in cartel violence in the northern state of Sinaloa that has left at least 30 people dead in the past week. Two warring factions of the Sinaloa cartel have clashed in the state capital of Culiacan in what appears to be a fight for power after two of its leaders were arrested in the US in late July. Teams of gunmen have shot at each other and the security forces. Meanwhile, dead bodies continued to be found across the city. On one busy street corner, cars drove
‘CICADA VOTERS’: A Fairfax County elections official said about one-third of local voters came to the polls on election day in 2020, while the rest voted by mail or early The Democratic and Republican national conventions are just a memory, the first and perhaps only debate between US Vice President Kamala Harris and former US president Donald Trump is in the bag and election offices are beginning to send out absentee ballots. Now come the voters. Yesterday was the start of early in-person voting for the US presidential election on Nov. 5, starting in Virginia, South Dakota and the home state of Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. The first ballots being cast in person were made with just over six weeks left before election day. About a dozen more states will
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
Peruvian authorities on Thursday scrambled to roll out a plan to fight fires raging out of control across the nation, razing crops, damaging archeological treasures and leaving several regions in a state of disaster. Firefighters said battling the blazes has grown increasingly difficult. “We’re tired,” said a volunteer firefighter in the forests of the northern Amazonas region who declined to give his name. “We put the fire out, it lights back up. We put it out, the fire breaks out again.” Firefighters in the area retreated from the flames on Thursday. “They’re out of control,” said Arturo Morales, another volunteer firefighter. “We need help.” Peruvian