Aid slow to reach tsunami victims

International aid trickled to survivors today after the earthquake and tsunami that devastated parts of the Solomon Islands.

But damaged airports caused a bottleneck in the flow of badly-needed water, food and medicine.

Many of the thousands of people left homeless by Monday morning’s disaster faced a third day of scrounging for basic supplies in the rubble, where bodies were still being found under buildings flattened by the quake and sludge deposited by the tsunami.

Devastation was widespread in Western Province’s main town of Gizo and surrounding coastal villages, many built on stilts. Survivors in outlying areas remained unreached because of cut roads.

One police patrol boat arrived in Gizo yesterday after travelling 10 hours from the capital, Honiara, with tents, tarpaulins, food and water. Three other boats will leave Honiara today for Munda, a nearby town that is becoming a main relief co-ordination point, chief government spokesman Alfred Maesulia said.

But Gizo’s airport remained closed and a boat journey of several hours was the only way to get emergency supplies to the town.

“We have not reached people as soon as we could ... because of the widespread nature of this particular disaster,” said Fred Fakarii, chairman of the National Disaster Management Council. “Our difficulty is getting to them quickly with what we have on the ground.”

Officials hoped to reopen the Gizo airport later today, unblocking aid flows.

Additional reports of people missing and damage continued to come in from areas with only patchy two-way radio communications, he said.

At least 28 people died in the tsunami and quake, including a bishop and three worshippers killed when a wave hit a church, and a New Zealand man who drowned trying to save his mother, who remains missing.

Officials said the toll was expected to rise as rescue crews reached outlying villages flattened by the waves. Bodies could be seen floating in the water by authorities conducting aerial surveys of the destruction; there was no official count of those missing.

Local officials said up to 5,000 people were encamped in hills behind Gizo with little water, food, or shelter, though the Red Cross put the number of homeless at around 2,000. Disaster council spokesman Julian Makaa said more than 900 homes had been destroyed.

Australia, New Zealand, the US, the International Red Cross and the United Nations were among those offering aid, but no formal relief plan was announced yesterday, after a day of meetings by senior government officials.

The 8.1-magnitude earthquake, which struck six miles beneath the sea floor about 25 miles from Gizo, set off alarms from Tokyo to Hawaii, testing procedures put in place after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that left 230,000 dead or missing in a dozen countries.

But because of Gizo’s proximity to the epicentre, the destructive waves – up to 16 feet high – hit before an alarm could be sounded. The disaster has rekindled debate about whether the multi-million-dollar warning systems installed after the 2004 tsunami are worth the cost.

“When you have a tsunami coming in so quickly after an earthquake, it doesn’t do much good to have an early warning system,” said US earthquake expert Kerry Sieh.

Officials would be better off putting more resources into disaster response education and permanently relocating vulnerable communities to higher ground, he said.

Michael Rottmann, the UN special co-ordinator for the early warning system in Indonesia, said warning systems were useful if the message got out quickly.

No significant tsunami was reported anywhere outside the Solomons, which comprise more than 200 islands with a population of about 552,000 people.