Tsunami death toll expected to rise

Stunned Samoans combed through the sodden wreckage of their lives today and told of the terror of the tsunami that ravaged towns and killed at least 149 people in the South Pacific.

Officials expect the death toll from yesterday’s disaster to rise as more areas are searched.

“The devastation caused was complete,” Samoan Prime Minister Tuilaepa Sailele said after inspecting the south-east coast of the main island of Upolu, the most heavily-hit area. “In some villages absolutely no house was standing. All that was achieved within 10 minutes by the very powerful tsunami.”

His own village of Lesa was washed away, as were many others in Samoa and nearby American Samoa and Tonga.

The magnitude 8.0 quake struck off Samoa at 6.48am local time (18.48pm Irish time) on Tuesday.

The islands were engulfed by four tsunami waves up to 20 feet high that reached up to a mile inland.

“To me it was like a monster – just black water coming to you. It wasn’t a wave that breaks, it was a full force of water coming straight,” said Luana Tavale, an American Samoa government employee.

Mr Tuilaepa said the death toll in Samoa was 110, mostly elderly and young children. At least 30 people were killed on American Samoa, Governor Togiola Tulafono said. Officials on the island of Tonga said nine people had been killed.

Samoan police commander Lilo Maiava predicted the toll would rise.

“It may take a week, two weeks or even three weeks” to complete the search for the many people still missing, he said.

The quake was centred about 120 miles south of Samoa, formerly part of New Zealand, which has about 220,000 people, and American Samoa, a US territory of 65,000. The two lie about halfway between New Zealand and Hawaii.

The Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre in Hawaii said it issued an alert, but the waves came so quickly that residents only had about 10 minutes to respond.

The heavily damaged south-east coast was a stretch of flattened, mud-swept villages. Mattresses hung from trees. Police searched for survivors amid pulverised homes and bodies scattered in a swamp.

Several tourist resorts were wiped out, authorities said, but they had no solid number of visitors in the area.

Three of the key resorts on the coast are scenes of “total devastation” while a fourth “has a few units standing on higher ground,” Nynette Sass of Samoa’s National Disaster Management committee told New Zealand’s National Radio.

In Tonga, a government spokesman said parts of an island have disappeared, with two of the island’s three villages virtually flattened.

“The hospital on the island has been severely damaged as well as the airport runway ... meaning no fixed-wing aircraft can land,” he said. A Tongan patrol boat has been sent with water, food and shelter for more than 1,000 residents.

In American Samoa’s capital of Pago Pago, power was expected to be out in some areas for up to a month, and officials said some 2,200 people were in seven shelters across the island.

Australian officials said they will send an air force plane carrying 20 tons of humanitarian aid, as well as aid officials and medical personnel to Samoa.

While the earthquake and tsunami were big, they were not as large as the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that killed more than 230,000 in a dozen countries across Asia.