Papua New Guinea landslide survivors slow to move to safer ground after hundreds buried

MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — Traumatized survivors of the massive landslide estimated to have buried hundreds in Papua New Guinea have been slow to move to safer ground as the South Pacific island nation’s authorities prepare to use heavy machinery to clear debris and risk triggering another landslide, officials said Thursday.

Government and army geotechnical experts on Thursday were examining the stability of the massive swath of rubble that crushed Yambali village when a mountainside collapsed last week, Enga provincial administrator Sandis Tsaka said. Australian and New Zealand experts were expected to arrive on Friday.

Two excavators and a bulldozer were ready to start digging on one side of the mass of debris more than 150 meters (500 feet) wide while another excavator and a bulldozer were also ready on the other side, Tsaka said. Villagers have been digging with spades, farming tools and their bare hands since the disaster in search of survivors or bodies.

“It’s still very active. We’re getting rocks and debris still moving so it’s been unsafe for our first responders and our emergency team,” Tsaka told The Associated Press.

The United Nations estimated 670 villagers died in the disaster that immediately displaced 1,650 survivors. Papua New Guinea’s government has told the United Nations it thinks more than 2,000 people were buried. Only six bodies have been retrieved.

A hospital in the provincial capital Wabag on Thursday reported 17 patients had been injured by the disaster, that struck at 3 a.m. while the village slept.

Authorities say that up to 8,000 people might need to be evacuated as the mass of boulders, earth and splintered trees that crushed Yambali becomes increasingly unstable and threatens to tumble