Solomons tsunami relief effort chaotic: Aid workers

Aid workers helping survivors of a tsunami disaster in the Solomon Islands complained today that the relief efforts were chaotic and lacked resources.

They warned of growing health risks for thousands left homeless in squalid camps.

“We are under-resourced; we need bigger vehicles,” said disaster official Jonathan Taisia at the main Red Cross centre in hard-hit Gizo, as a chartered helicopter landed with the latest load of tarpaulins and food.

Much of the aid coming into Gizo wasn’t being distributed beyond depots because of vehicle shortages, and a lack of workers to load trucks or clear debris that has severed road links to outlying villages, he said.

Drinking water is in extremely short supply on Ghizo, the island on which Gizo town sits, as is food and medicine. Most aid was being delivered to Munda, on a nearby island, and a shortage of boats hampered efforts. Most of the local fleet of canoes and other vessels was destroyed by the tsunami.

In Honiara, the capital, officials scrambled to find enough supplies to cope with the disaster in the north-west of the country, an impoverished chain of some 200 islands with a population of about 550,000.

At least 28 people were killed, with officials saying more reported deaths were expected to be confirmed. Authorities have estimated the number of homeless at about 5,600.

“The recovery operation is not going as fast as expected because of delays here in Honiara,” Alfred Maesulia, an official in the Prime Minister’s Department, said. “Suppliers don’t have the volumes of relief materials we need to send.”

The risk of disease mounted. A senior Red Cross official said some children in camps in Gizo were suffering from diarrhoea. National Disaster Management Council chairman Fred Fakarii warned cholera, malaria and other diseases were also a potential threat.

At a makeshift clinic at a survivor camp on high ground behind Gizo, nurse Hugo Losena bandaged bone fractures, stitched cuts and struggled to treat internal bleeding – the most common injuries among the three dozen people who have slept on sodden mattresses at the camp since Monday’s earthquake and tsunami.

About 20 people have been evacuated by helicopter from Gizo, he said, but many other areas were still to be reached more than three days after the disaster.