Blankets needed in Fiji

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 33060, 30 October 1972, Page 16

Blankets needed in Fiji

(By

DEREK ROUND,

N.Z.P.A. special correspondent)

SUVA, October 29.

An urgent appeal to Australians and New Zealanders to give blankets for tens of thousands of Fiji hurricane victims was made yesterday as relief workers and officials faced the grim task of assessing the damage left in the wake of Hurricane Bebe.

“We desperately need blankets. We can take all we can get,” the Fiji Red Cross welfare director (Mrs N. Edgar) said. There was also an urgent need for clothes and baby clothes.

Fiji sweltered in temperatures in the high seventies yesterday, but at night it is a different story. Thousands of villagers huddle miserably in the remains of what were their homes until the hurricane struck.

Government officials and Red Cross workers have managed to get thousands of homeless into refugee centres hastily set up in schools, churches, and community centres. But they face a colossal task.

At least 25,000 are homeless in the north-western part of Fiji, according to an Australian priest who has just been round the devastated villages. “That’s a conservative estimate,’* Father V, Batchelor,

of Cohuna, Victoria, said today. Thousands of Fijians and Indians faced starvation, and many could die from pneumonia unless they got food, blankets; and clothing quickly. “It just looks as though the place has been hit by bombs,” Father Batchelor said.

He found people still dazed and shocked in the Ba Valley villages he has visited since the hurricane roared through last Tuesday. He counted two dead and 40 injured while on his journey. “It’s amazing many more were not killed,” he said. Father Batchelor had to crawl under the wreckage of one house to help an Indian woman lying there with an injured back. “It was terrible,” he said. BASIC NEEDS A few weeks ago, Father Batchelor sold his car, and has already spent $2OO of the money he got for it buying desperately needed food for hurricane victims. “We urgently need basic things

like salt, flour, rice, sugar, and milk powder for the babies,” he said. “And we badly need clothes and blankets.

“It gets really cold at night, and people are just huddling together trying to keep warm. All their things were blown away, or carried away by flood waters.” Father Batchelor prays that it does not rain again. “It would be another disaster if it rained now,” he said. New Zealand has already sent 500 Army tents to Fiji, but so far none have reached Votua or any other villages in the Ba area. But they are urgently needed. A New Zealand Red Cross relief co-ordinator (Mr R. McKerrow) who went to Votua and other villages today has sent an urgent request to the Red Cross for more food, blankets, and clothing. “Its really grim,” he said. TENTS “A GODSEND”

Five tons of milk powder from the New Zealand Red Cross is due at Suva by ship tomorrow, and clothing and milk biscuits are being flown from Wellington. New Zealand rushed the first of 500 tents up in Royal New Zealand Air Force Bristol freighters to help shelter the homeless. An R.N.Z.A.F. Hercules flew into Nandi with more tents today after a quick turn-round at Ohakea after its return from exercises in Singapore. “Those tents are a godsend. I don’t know what we’d have done without them,” a Fiji Government spokesman said. “New Zealand was really on the ball. We made the request only on Thursday, and the first tents arrived yesterday.” Australia, too, has weighed in with a quick gift of $25,000, the United States has offered $35,000, and Britain has asked how she can help. PROBLEM OF FOOD The Fiji Government, apart from housing the refugees, faces a major problem of feeding them. A lot of the staple root crop, dalo, was badly damaged by the hurricane and floods, and will rot in the ground in the next two or three weeks. “We will have a major task of feeding tens of thousands of people over several months until new crops grow,” a Government spokesman said. Two New Zealand Red Cross relief co-ordinators, Messrs McKerrow (a Mount Cook National Park ranger) who has worked in Bangladesh and Vietnam, and J. Longworth (Wellington) flew to Suva today and went straight into an assessment of relief needs with Red Cross workers.

They plan to go to the badly hit north-west part of Viti Levu early tomorrow. One of them will probably go to the Yasawas, northwest of Viti Levu, where damage is believed to be the heaviest, although reports filtering back to Suva from the islands are still only sketchy. At Nausori, near Suva, where there was heavy flooding and thousands fled their homes, flood waters have now receded and villagers are drying out.