A massive landslide is feared to have killed hundreds of people after hitting isolated villages in Papua New Guinea, local officials and aid agencies said.
The landslide buried more than 100 homes after hitting around 3 a.m. local time (5 p.m. GMT Thursday) on Friday in the Enga highlands in the north of the island in the southwest Pacific.
It was not immediately clear how many people were trapped under the rubble.
Enga Governor Peter Ipatas told the AFP news agency it was an “unprecedented natural disaster”.
Andrew Ruing, a community leader, told the Reuters news agency that people were sleeping when the landslide occurred. “More than 300 lives were covered by debris and rocks,” he said.
“Food, gardens, people, properties worth more than millions have been lost, taken away by all these things,” he added.
Busibess leader Elizabeth Iarume told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that “the entire village was destroyed”.
Villager Ninga Role also said he believed hundreds of people had died.. The scale of the landslide also made it difficult to rescue survivors, he added.
“The area covered by the landslide is large and there are rocks and trees everywhere,” Role told Reuters by telephone. “It’s very difficult to get them out.”
Humanitarian organization Care Australia said in a statement: “While the area is not densely populated, our concern is that the death toll could be disproportionately high.”
Clearing the road will take a long time and “this will hamper assessment and relief efforts”, he added.
Papua New Guinea Prime Minister James Marape said disaster officials had been dispatched to “commence relief work, recovery of bodies and reconstruction of infrastructure”.
Videos show villagers climbing rocks to reach those buried there.
People can be heard crying and screaming in a video posted by Facebook user Kindupan Kambii from Kaokalam village in Enga.
The Papua New Guinea Red Cross Society said an emergency response team comprising officials from the provincial governor’s office, police, defense forces and local NGOs had deployed on the site.
Enga is more than 600 km (372 miles) by road from the country’s capital, Port Moresby.
