PAPUA NEW GUINEA: Wars, Volcanoes Keep Rabaul in Rubble

By Kunda Dixit Reprint | | Print |

Kunda Dixit

RABAUL, Papua New Guinea, Jul 5 1995 (IPS) - Fifty years ago, this scenic city at the northern tip of the island of New Britain was bombed to rubble in one of the most relentless U.S. air raids of the Pacific War. Today, Rabaul lies once more in ruins.

In September last year, two simultaneous volcanic eruptions buried the town in red-hot rock and ash. Homes, offices and the airport, rebuilt after the war, were wiped out in hours.

On Mango Avenue, a satellite dish atop the telecommunications building still points to the sky, its parabola half-filled with pumice. Rabaul is a ghost town: cars, cranes and planes frozen Pompeii-like where they are abandoned nine months ago.

Not a single building remains standing, and the mudflows and ash are two storeys high in some places.

“The first to collapse was the kitchen,” says Peter Niesi, pointing to his ruined home. “We kept coming back to sweep the sand and rocks off the roof. But we couldn’t keep up.”

Because of early warning, the scale of the devastation is out of proportion to the number of casualties: five killed. But the volcanoes kept on belching ash for another four months, and 50,000 people in and around Rabaul lost homes and livelihoods.

“I’d say we got off pretty lightly,” says Leith Anderson, head of the Natural Disaster Relief Organisation at the prime minister’s office in Port Moresby, 800 km to the south. “And we have learnt our lesson. This time we are relocating the town.”

Rabaul’s picturesque location is also the reason for the natural and manmade disasters that have devastated it many times over the years.

The natural harbour that made it a convenient shelter for the German colonial rulers of northern New Guinea and a strategic stopover for the invading Japanese in their push toward Australia is actually a submerged caldera of an enormous volcano surrounded by a deadly necklace of smaller vents.

The Germans established their trading post in Rabaul in 1882, and set up coconut plantations and an excellent network of roads that traversed New Britain and the nearby island of New Ireland. When World War I arrived, the Australians invaded Rabaul and drove the Germans out.

In 1937, the water in the harbour boiled as the volcanoes erupted killing nearly 1,000 people.

Between the wars, Rabaul was the capital of Australian New Guinea until the Japanese invaded in 1942 and established a naval base here with nearly 100,000 servicemen. But by 1943, the Japanese were on the defensive as the U.S. bombers began pounding Rabaul from the air — dropping nearly 25,000 tons of bombs.

The Japanese were so well entrenched in their elaborate network of tunnels under the volcanoes that the allies decided not to try to capture the town. When Japan surrendered in August 1945, Rabaul was still in Japanese hands.

Compared to the rugged mountains and jungles of the main island of New Guinea, New Britain got a head start because of early European colonisation. The highways, schools, ports, coconut and palm plantations set up by the Germans are still the envy of the rest of Papua New Guinea.

The eruptions of the Rabaul volcanoes, Tavurvur and Vulcan, were only the latest in a series of disasters that have hit the country in recent years.

Buffeted by typhoons that whirl out of the South Pacific, Papua New Guinea is also prone to earthquakes and flash floods that race down mountains along the country’s steep central spine.

“The only thing we don’t have are blizzards,” says Anderson, but immediately corrects himself. “Not true, hikers sometimes get lost in snowstorms and we have take helicopters out to rescue them.”

Although they are astride the equator, it snows on the slopes of the 5,000-metre peaks of the Highlands that Papua New Guinea shares with the neighbouring Indonesian province of Irian Jaya.

Besides the Tavurvur and Vulcan, there are 23 other active volcanoes in northern Papua New Guinea that are closely monitored.

“When the earthquakes started, the place was shaking continuously. The people were ready by the time the volcanoes went off. They jumped into cars and buses and raced away. There was no panic, the people knew where to go,” recalls John Toguata, deputy commissioner of East New Britain province.

Despite the low loss of life, the PNG economy was badly hit by the eruptions, suffering an estimate one billion dollar in damages. Ten percent of the country’s coconut plantations were destroyed, and the volcanic debris also hit a big cocoa producing area.

Some 23,000 people are still living in tent cities on the outskirts of Rabaul waiting for rehabilitation in permanent settlements to be built in the town of Kopoko.

“Rebuilding Rabaul in the same place is going to be costly, these volcanoes are not going to wait another 50 years to go off,” says Anderson.

Papua New Guinea’s severe economic crisis and cash crunch has delayed relief efforts, while the costly insurgency in the neighbouring island of Bougainville has sucked resources away from rehabilitation for Rabaul.

Insurance companies are using the fine print that distinguishes between damage caused by volcanoes and tectonic earthquakes to avoid paying for the 800 million dollars in damage claims. So far, only 100 million dollars have been paid.