PAPUA NEW GUINEA: Volcanoes, Wars Keeping Rabaul in Rubble

By Kunda Dixit Reprint | | Print |

Kunda Dixit

RABAUL, Papua New Guinea, Jul 8 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 were 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.