Mudslides cover villages

Press, 31 May 1986, Page 21

Mudslides cover villages

From

DEBRA MILLAR

in Honiara

Giant mudslides sweep from the Highlands on the main island of Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands with protruding thatched roof tops and strewn timber the only sign of villages consumed in the torrent.

There is little sign of life in the scarred landscape — one of the most fertile areas of the Solomon Islands and the area hit worst by Cyclone Namu.

Whole hillsides slipped away in the storm ajjd in some places the mud, washed down from the hills, lies almost to the top of palm trees.

Palmleaf houses not swept out to sea lie buried in the mud, almost invisible from the air. Two vital road bridges have disappeared, stranding the flooded palm plantations and palm oil factories depended upon heavily by the Solomon Islands Government.

The island rice paddies supplying the staple food

of the Solomon Islanders are covered with a thick layer of silt. The palm trees which the islanders use to build their homes lean precariously, stripped and tattered. About 100 people were killed in the flooding and mudslide which roared across the Guadalcanal plain after torrents of water burst from behind dams of uprooted trees and the chain of rivers running down from the hills.

The previously lush, green flat land is now coated with a thick blanket of slushy mud and

rocks and strewn with timber picked up in the highlands and dumped across the plains. Few of the villages hugging the coastline from the southern tip of Guadalcanal and along the plain appear to have escaped the devastation. Palmleaf houses are visible either slumped to the ground or with their roofs blown away. Even more sturdily built buildings bear the scars of the storm.

The people have gone from the worst-hit areas, most fleeing the floodwaters in only the clothes

they wore. In other villages which have been returned to, clothes and belongings lie outside on the ground drying in the sun. Gardens are mostly ruined as well as small cash crops such as cocoa, on which many depended for a living. Closer to Honiara, the capital of the Solomons, timber litters the coastline and a Government freighter used to distribute supplies round the islands lies washed up on the beach. Power poles are snapped off and the town’s only water supply has been cut.