PORT MORESBY (Papau New Guinea) — Volunteer rescuers ran non-stop airlifts to remote areas of Papua New Guinea on Tuesday (Sept 13), seeking to reach victims still stranded two days after a massive 7.6-magnitude earthquake.
The quake rattled a broad area of the country's north, killing at least seven people, but the scale of the disaster is only slowly coming into focus.
Pilot Jurgen Ruh, the owner of Manolos Aviation Limited, told AFP he had"lost count" of the number of medical evacuations he had carried out since the earthquake hit Sunday morning. Mr Ruh said his company had been fielding calls directly from people in need of evacuation, adding that in Papua New Guinea,"if you don't help yourself, no one will help you".The earthquake was the largest in the Pacific nation since 2002 but has so far claimed far fewer lives than the last major quake, which killed 145 people in 2018.