Authorities report that at least three people have died after a strong earthquake struck a rural area of Papua New Guinea early on Sunday. The magnitude 7.6 earthquake that shook the Pacific nation also caused infrastructure damage and other injuries.
The three victims perished in a landslide near the gold-mining town of Wau, according to Charley Masange, the disaster director for the province of Morobe. According to Masange, other persons had suffered injuries from falling objects or debris, and several hospitals, residences, rural roads, and highways had suffered damage.
Masange warned that it would take some time to determine the exact scope of the casualties and property destruction in the area. However, he said that considering the magnitude of the earthquake, the region’s sparse and dispersed population and absence of substantial structures close to the epicenter in the country’s mostly underdeveloped highlands may have contributed to averting a worse catastrophe.
One inhabitant of the hamlet nearest to the epicenter spoke to the AP to recount his experience.
Renagi Ravu was meeting with two colleagues at his home in Kainantu when the quake struck.
Ravu tried to stand up from his chair but couldn’t maintain his balance and ended up in a kind of group hug with his colleagues, while plates and cups crashed from his shelves to the ground, he said. His children, ages 9 and 2, had their drinks and breakfast spill over.
Ravu, who is a geologist, said he tried to calm everybody as the shaking continued for more than a minute.
He said that about 10,000 people live in and around his town, which is located 66 kilometers, or 41 miles, from the quake’s epicenter.
He said people were feeling rattled.
“It’s a common thing that earthquakes are felt here, but it usually doesn’t last as long and is not as violent as this one,” Ravu said. “It was quite intense.”
Ravu was sorting through the damage to his home, which he said likely included a broken sewer pipe judging from the smell. He said friends elsewhere in Kainantu had messaged him with descriptions of cracked roads, broken pipes and fallen debris, but hadn’t described major building collapses or injuries.
“They are starting to clean up their houses and the streets,” he said. Communication seems to have been affected, he added, with some cell towers likely to have fallen.
A magnitude 7.5 earthquake in 2018 in the nation’s central region killed at least 125 people. That quake hit areas that are remote and undeveloped, and assessments about the scale of the damage and injuries were slow to filter out.
Felix Taranu, a seismologist at the Geophysical Observatory in the capital Port Moresby, said it was too early to know the full impacts of Sunday’s earthquake, although its strength meant it “most likely caused considerable damage.”
According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the quake hit at 9:46 a.m. local time at a depth of 90 kilometers (56 miles). NOAA advised there was no tsunami threat for the region.
Papua New Guinea is located on the eastern half of the island of New Guinea, to the east of Indonesia and north of eastern Australia. It sits on the Pacific’s “Ring of Fire,” the arc of seismic faults around the Pacific Ocean where much of the world’s earthquakes and volcanic activity occurs.