A14 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 19 , 2022
of emergency and were meeting
with representatives from Aus-
tralia and New Zealand, the re-
gion’s two wealthiest countries, to
discuss ways they could assist.
United Nations officials said a
distress signal had been detected
from the low-lying Ha’apai group
of islands, raising “particular con-
cern” for the residents there. A
satellite image circulating on
s ocial media, apparently taken
during the New Zealand surveil-
lance mission, rated the damage
on Mango island as “catastrophic.”
The breakdown of Tonga’s
phone and Internet communica-
tions has l ed to an anxious wait for
families, especially those living
abroad. Sela Fonua, a 35-year-old
in Auckland, New Zealand, spoke
with her family Sunday morning
via a satellite phone at a Tongan
government office where her
brother worked.
The biggest problem on Tonga -
tapu, the largest island in the ar-
chipelago where her family and
much of the country’s population
live, was volcanic ash in the erup-
tion’s aftermath and concerns
about the water supply, Fonua
said.
“They have been advised not to
drink the tank or town water,” shesaid. “To say [my parents] were
pretty scared would be an under-
statement. They said they have
never heard such a frightening
‘boom’ sound before in their life.”
Fonua’s husband, an American
pilot, died in August. She was to
return to Tonga this week on a
repatriation flight with her five
children, to be with family while
they grieved. Now, that plan is in
doubt. “I have been longing to go
since I lost my husband five
months ago — just for a hug from
Dad and, you know, my mother
knows best,” she said. “But now I
have to think twice.”
Siu Siola’a, 30, lives in Sydney
and has not been able to commu-
nicate with friends or family. She
runs a freight business and is or-
ganizing a shipment of food and
water t o charities i n her h omeland
that will take about a month to
arrive. “We’re all dying to hear
from family members,” she said.
Some aid agencies have local
staff members on the ground. The
International Federation of Red
Cross and Red Crescent Societies
(IFRC) had 10 staff members and
70 volunteers in Tonga, but it
hasn’t heard from them since Sat-
urday.
The organization h ad p revious-cording to Our World in Data. Fiji
and Australia are battling out-
breaks of the omicron variant of
the coronavirus, a factor that
could weigh into officials’ reluc-
tance to let foreign aid workers in.
With Tongan airplane runways
closed by volcanic ash, UNICEF is
loading supplies onto Australian
and New Zealand naval ships that
should get to the archipelago in
coming days. It i s unclear whether
military personnel from those
countries will be allowed on
shore.
The IFRC plans to send sup-
plies for an additional 2,900 fami-
lies when air routes reopen, al-
though much of the aid might not
be immediately distributed. “We
have been informed that any of
the relief supplies that are sent to
the islands need to be quaran-
tined,” Rokovucago said. “If that’swhat the government wants, we’ll
have to adhere to that.”
The biggest concern at the mo-
ment is drinking water, Veitch
said. UNICEF was sending water,
water-testing kits and desalina-
tion devices, and the ships will be
equipped w ith larger desalination
plants. (Rokovucago said she
hoped the government would not
quarantine water supplies.)
According to World Health Or-
ganization officials, the govern-
ment h as advised the Tongan pub-
lic to remain indoors, use masks if
going out, and drink b ottled water
to avoid contamination from ash.
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]Miller and Vinall reported from
Melbourne, Australia. Helier Cheung
in London contributed to this report.BY RACHEL PANNETT,
MICHAEL E. MILLER
AND FRANCES VINALLsydney — The Pacific nation of
Tonga, scrambling to recover from
a devastating volcanic eruption
on Saturday that sent tsunami
waves halfway around the world,
faces a new threat: a potential
“tsunami” of coronavirus infec-
tions.
Aid groups and d efense officials
from Australia and New Zealand
are working on contactless ways
to deliver water and other vital
supplies to the remote archipela-
go kingdom, which is one of the
few places in the world to remain
essentially free of the virus. (Resi-
dents went into a brief lockdown
in November when a single case,
Tonga’s first, was detected in a
person at a quarantine hotel.)
“A s much as we are going to
send assistance, we will still need
to follow the covid-19 protocols to
keep the people in the population
safe, rather than ... [have] a tsu-
nami of covid hitting Tonga,” a
senior Tongan diplomat in Can-
berra, Curtis Tuihalangingie, told
Australian public radio Tuesday.
On Tuesday, i n their first official
statement on the crisis, Tongan
authorities said the “unprec-
edented disaster” had generated
tsunami w aves of up to 49 feet and
caused extensive damage. At least
three deaths were confirmed — a
British national, a 65-year-old
woman from Mango island and a
49-year-old man from Nomuka
island — and all of the houses on
Mango, which reportedly has
more than 30 inhabitants, were
destroyed.
“Water supplies have been seri-
ously affected by the v olcanic ash,”
the statement added.
The first clear images of the
destruction wrought by the erup-
tion and subsequent tsunami
emerged Tuesday after a New Zea-
land military surveillance flight
returned from the area. The aerial
photos show land and trees blan-
keted in ash on Nomuka, a small
island near the Hunga Tonga-
Hunga Ha’apai volcano.
Tonga has been largely cut off
from the world since the twin
disasters, which damaged an un-
dersea communications link.
Some local calls were restored
over the weekend, but contact
with islands near the volcano has
been severely limited.
Officials have declared a state
ly placed disaster supplies, i nclud-
ing tarpaulins a nd water, for 1 ,
families i n 10 locations o utside t he
capital, Nuku’alofa, said Sainiana
Rokovucago, programs coordina-
tor for t he IFRC i n Fiji, a dding that
she hoped the s taff members were
spreading those supplies to
h arder-hit outer islands.
The U.N. children’s agency,
UNICEF, normally has several
employees i n Tonga, b ut they were
outside the country when the vol-
cano erupted, complicating the
group’s response, said Jonathan
Veitch, a senior UNICEF Pacific
official. “Running this thing re-
motely is really, really challeng-
ing, especially with no comms,” he
said, adding that the United Na-
tions had only 23 people in Tonga
at the moment.
UNICEF has had informal dis-
cussions about the possibility of
sending aid workers, but so far
Tonga has signaled it wants to
maintain tight border controls.
“They have no covid,” Veitch said.
“The way they have played it over
the past two years has been suc-
cessful for them.”
About 60 percent of Tonga’s
roughly 105,000 residents had
been fully vaccinated against the
coronavirus as of last week, ac-As world responds to volcanic disaster, Tonga hopes to avert a covid ‘tsunami’
NEW ZEALAND DEFENSE FORCE/GETTY IMAGES
An aerial photo shows homes covered by volcanic ash Monday on the Tongan island of Nomuka. The
Tongan government said the “unprecedented disaster” had generated tsunami waves of up to 49 feet
and caused extensive damage. Aid groups and others were working on con tact less ways to deliver
supplies to Tonga, o ne of the few places in the world to remain essentially free of the coronavirus.Va lerie Bertinelli@POSTLIVE #POSTLIVE Listen wherever podcasts are available.Wednesday, January 19 at 4:00 p.m.The Emmy and Golden Globeaward-winning actor, TV host andbest-selling author reflects on herrock-and-roll marriage to Eddie VanHalen and her long TV career.To register to watch, visitwapo.st/bertinellijan20 22or scan code with asmartphone camera: