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Aid agencies reported “extensive damage” in the Pacific island nation of Tonga on Tuesday following a massive underwater volcanic blast and tsunami, as the first death from the disaster was confirmed.
Early indications of the scale of the crisis on the virtually cut-off island kingdom were emerging through patchy satellite phone contact with Tonga, surveillance flights and satellite images, three days after the volcanic eruption.
The body of a British woman swept away by the tsunami had been found, her family said. At least one other person in Tonga was reported missing.
Australia and New Zealand, which scrambled Orion reconnaissance plane flights over Tonga the previous day, readied aid ships for deployment to Tonga.
The UN said a signal had been detected from a distress beacon on a low-lying island, Mango.
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said surveillance flights had confirmed “substantial property damage” on Mango and another island, Fonoi.
“An active distress beacon had been detected from Mango,” OCHA agency said in an urgent report. The island is home to more than 30 people, according to Tongan census figures.
Volcanic ash and dust
OCHA also reported “extensive damage” on the western beaches of the main island Tongatapu, “with several resorts and/or houses destroyed and/or badly damaged”.
Tonga’s capital Nuku’alofa was blanketed in two centimetres of volcanic ash and dust, it said. Power had been restored to parts of the capital. Local phones systems had been restored but international communications were severed.
The capital’s waterfront, it said, was “seriously damaged with rocks and debris pushed inland from the tsunami”.
Satellite images released by the United Nations Satellite Centre showed the impact of the eruption and tsunami on the tiny island of Nomuka, one of the closest to the Hunga-Tonga-Hunga-Ha’apai volcano.
The…
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Source : france24
