When the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Haapai volcano erupted with great force at 5:10 p.m. local time on January 15, Soen Francis Siua, a Catholic seminary student in Fiji, heard a loud boom and tried to figure out where the Earth was. Why was it rattling?
Thunderstorm? Earthquake? Cyclone? No, he quickly found out: it was a volcano from where he grew up in Tonga. When it exploded a few years ago, he remembered the house. This time, he suspected something worse based on what he could feel from 400 miles away.
He called his mother to Tongtapu, the main island. He replied, offering up some details from a horrifying scene. Tsunami warning. Thick clouds. A storm of black rocks is pelting buildings, tossing cars like stones on tiles.
“It was all falling from the sky, and it scared him,” he said. “It was the first time he had ever seen anything like this.”
Trying to remain calm, he promised to call his sisters in the United States again after giving the news. But he was. He could not see his mother again for about a week.
It was the same for the thousands of Tongans who live far outside the Pacific Empire. For nearly an hour, phone calls and videos posted on social media showed signs of the world’s largest volcanic eruption in decades. Then the lone undersea cable connecting Tonga to the world broke, breaking into a violent upheaval.
A photo provided by the Australian Ministry of Defense shows an Australian military aircraft that landed on the island of Tonga on Thursday, January 20, 2022 to deliver emergency aid. (Australian Defense Ministry via The New York Times)
And with it came the disconnection that has defined disaster so far. Even as the scale of the eruption spread far and wide—with a sonic boom heard as far away as Alaska, and killed two people and an oil spill in Peru—the closest to the explosion Human influence seemed to fade from view, defying the expectations of a hyper-connected age.
While the rest of the world was left to worry and worry at the sight of a 300-mile-wide volcanic mushroom cloud captured by distant satellites, Tonga had barely any communication, the only visceral experience of the volcano and tsunami that followed. Did.
“I’ve dealt with a lot of crises like this,” said Jonathan Veitch, the UN coordinator based in Fiji, who said it usually takes half an hour for UN staff after a disaster but a full day. In Tonga. “It’s a little different.”
A week later, what happened on the ground is now coming to light only through clipped conversations on satellite phones relying on clear skies. The picture is a hazy landscape of hitherto destroyed property, narrow escapes and little local cleanup, but it’s clear that the human toll has yet to match the worst fears of people like the Siua.
So far only three deaths have been reported. The most immediate concern concerns the risk of ash-contaminated drinking water and aid distribution – which began Thursday – is bringing COVID-19 for a country that coronavirus– Free after closing its borders when the pandemic started.
But more than a week after the volcano erupted, the process of thoroughly assessing the damage, no objection to the answer, is still proceeding at a pace from the pre-Internet era.
As of Thursday, at least 10 sparsely populated islands where buildings appeared damaged were yet to be investigated by the Tongan Navy or another agency, while at least one aid flight from Australia was returned because of positive COVID-19. was given. Case on board.
The challenge, perhaps, cannot be separated from geography. Tonga, a nation of about 170 islands that is about 1,400 miles northwest of New Zealand (and 3,000 miles from Hawaii) has always been difficult to reach. It was first inhabited around 3,000 years ago, which gives it a much shorter human history than Australia or other countries in the Asia-Pacific region.
While celebrated for its white sand beaches, the archipelago is also vulnerable to a wide range of disasters. Climate change has brought rising seas to low-lying coral islands. Cyclones and powerful storms are erupting in the region more frequently and with greater strength as the planet warms.
And it can all be found below: Tonga sits along the so-called Ring of Fire, where tectonic plates quake and grind their way into islands still rising from the deep with deadly active volcanoes.
Hungama Tonga has been a source of fear for years. And it had been rumbling for weeks. The volcano sent plumes of steam and gases on 29 and 30 December and again on 13 January.
“In 20/20, these events were pointing to an increase in gas pressure in the upper part of the volcano,” said volcanologist Shane Cronin of the University of Auckland in New Zealand.
Visuals from a surveillance aircraft with the New Zealand Defense Force during a reconnaissance flight over an area of Tonga showing heavy ash falling from the recent volcanic eruption, January 17, 2022. (Cpl. The New York Times via Vanessa Parker/New Zealand Defense Force)
In Tonga, where a new government was elected in November, explosions warned – be prepared. Siua, 24, said her mother, who lives inland, stockpiled food and water. Other people did the same.
The explosion nonetheless came as a surprise. Sound 15 Jan was deaf and dizzy. Many people in Tonga have told relatives that it felt like a bomb went off right next to them, and then kept detonating again and again.
“The first explosion, it was a huge explosion,” said 40-year-old Kofola Marion Kupu, a radio journalist in the capital Nuku’alofa, in a phone interview. “Our ears started ringing. We couldn’t hear anything.”
Like many others, however, Kupu knew exactly what to do: run away.
With their mother, their husband, their three children and their three cousins, they grabbed everything they could and ran for higher ground.
“We knew it was a live volcano erupting – we were warned,” she said. “When the explosion happened, everyone just ran because they were expecting a tsunami.”
The erupting of magma from below drove a cloud of debris into the sky about 20 miles away. Within minutes, the rocks began to fall with a rumble that sounded like very heavy rain.
After that a thick layer of ash got accumulated. Then came the mighty waves. Scientists had predicted that the swelling leading to Tongatapu, where about three-quarters of Tonga’s 100,000 people live, would rise to about 4 feet. Early video from the capital before the internet shutdown at around 6:40 pm can be seen flooding the streets and breaking down fences as cars ran away.
Tongan officials later said small, low-lying islands close to the volcano saw tsunami waves of up to 15 feet, perhaps more.
The waves washed away at least three people, including Angela Glover, who had originally England, She had moved to Tonga and opened an animal shelter with her husband, a tattoo artist. After the volcano erupted, she posted a photo of a red, spectacular sunset on Instagram, telling her followers that “everything is fine.” But when she returned to rescue some of the dogs she was taking care of, she drowned.
Her husband, who had found her body a few days later, escaped by clutching a tree. Many more people climbed up and did the same. Tricia Emberson, 56, said her uncle and her son, who live on a small island near Tongatapu that was flooded with water, climbed trees for safety.
“The island was submerged or partially submerged, and pretty much everything was swept away,” she said.
Pangaimoto Island Resort, which his uncle has been running for decades, appears to be gone. His own home, he told her in a phone call that lasted at 4 a.m. Thursday after dozens of redial attempts, the entire rear wall was pushed into the sea.
“You grow up with it,” she said in an interview from Australia, where she has been living since just before COVID-19, which led to the closure of international borders. “You don’t really know the scale of these things, but you grow up with the instinct of what to do, and I think the proof is that we’ve had very few deaths so far.”
Many Tongans overseas who have managed to talk to their relatives – usually early in the morning, when satellite service was less in demand – reported that their anxious calls were mostly answered with polite requests not to worry. Tongans are known for their relaxed, relaxed culture and their Christian faith, which at times seems to clash with the concern of an ever-connected world.
Mitty Cummings, who lives in New Zealand, said she had been calling her mother and stepdad nonstop throughout the week in Tonga, barely sleeping, randomly dialing their number and hoping that for some reason she would get it. Will go
When she finally spoke to them, she said that they were “typically Tongans”.
“They just said, ‘Oh, it’s okay; don’t worry about us; take care of yourself. We’ll be fine; we’re staying inside because the ashes are really bad.'”
“It was such a relief,” she said—until she called after 4 a.m. and realized she had failed to ask.
“I don’t even know that their house is still standing,” she said.
Siua, a seminary student, said that when he finally reached out to his mother at the end of the week, and immediately reconnected her with his sisters, he ended the call without a full picture.
She is relieved to learn that her cousins are checking on her mother, who lives alone, but it makes her think about her aunts and uncles on the island of Atata.
No one listened to his relatives there. He only knew that in the photos taken from above after the explosion, there was not much left: just empty space in the trees and some buildings. Everything was covered in the grey-brown dust of Hunga Tonga-Hunga Haapai.
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