‘If There’s Anyone Else Out There, They’re Dead’

AMSOR, Papua New Guinea —  As night falls on this ravaged seaside village, the sky begins to glow with the fires of the burning dead.

Too difficult to handle and too hard to reach, the victims of Friday’s tsunami, which wiped out a string of hamlets in this South Pacific nation, are now being torched in the same collapsed huts where they drowned.

“Three, maybe four people inside,” villager Patrick Talwug said as he looked into the blaze of a burning shack. “We are not sure, but we know because of the smell. Many people die here.” Talwug lifted a burning ember from the fire to light his way home and disappeared into the jungle darkness.

Death looms everywhere along this 20-mile stretch of beach, which was nearly washed away by a wall of water up to 30 feet tall that killed at least 1,200 people. Neighbors dig graves for neighbors. Boats drag nets across the Sissano Lagoon and bag 10 bodies a pull. The village of Amsor stands empty and silent, a graveyard of huts and stilts, save for a lone scavenging dog and the songs of tropical birds.

“I’m never going back,” said Lina Arosi, who tumbled 500 yards through rushing water and survived by grabbing onto the branch of a mangrove tree. “My father is now buried in that village.”

As the people here struggle to recover, rescue workers continued Tuesday to work through the wreckage left by the three waves that swept through the area. Teams of volunteers, often guided by smell, swung machetes through the dense tropical foliage looking for bodies. Helicopters hummed low to scan the brush, hoping to spot villagers too frightened to come out. Boats cruised the Sissano Lagoon, still flush with floating bodies.

Prime Minister William Skate, touring the disaster zone, predicted that the death toll would rise to 2,500. “There’s got to be more,” he said, dressed in shorts and a print shirt. “I counted 38 bodies myself in less than an hour.”

Some volunteers predicted that even that estimate might prove optimistic. Of the 10,000 people who inhabited the coastal villages hit by the waves, only about 3,000 have been accounted for, with about 600 of those recovering in hospitals.

“I think we’ve saved all the people we’re going to save,” said David Sumner, manager of Mission Air Fellowships, a group of pilots helping to ferry medicine and injured people. “If there’s anyone else out there, they’re dead.”

Almost everyone found alive has been evacuated to points miles away to receive food, medical care and shelter. At one site, an emergency field hospital run by the Australian army, survivors nursed their wounds, learned the fate of loved ones and grimly recounted that they somehow lived through the torrent.

Most, like Chris Mauk, said they were startled by the earthquake that struck about 6 p.m. Friday but didn’t think much of it. Temblors are common enough on the northern coast of New Guinea, an island shared by Papua New Guinea and Indonesia that is perched on the Pacific Ocean’s infamous Ring of Fire. This one, though, was different: It was magnitude 7 and its epicenter was just offshore.

Then came that eerie, howling noise. “It sounded like a jet airplane, like a loud engine,” said Mauk, a farmer in Arop village who was sitting down to dinner with his family. “We all thought it was a big plane flying in the sky.”

The wave crashed into Mauk’s house, pushing him underwater, thrusting him forward, forcing seawater into his lungs. When he surfaced, he did not see his family and heard only screams. Houses and trees were floating by.

“Then we saw a second wave,” Mauk said. He was driven under again, tumbled some more and smashed into a tree or piece of house. He surfaced, grabbed onto a log, then found his brother, who towed him to safety.

On Tuesday, Mauk sat on a stretcher at the Australian field hospital, a dazed and broken man. His legs, chest and arms were mottled with scabs, and a large white bandage covered a gash in his head. His wife, mother and a second brother are dead.

Mauk said he will try to rebuild his life but in a place far away--and much farther inland--than the village of Arop, of which he observed: “That place is no good anymore.”

In the hamlets around Amsor, everything on Tuesday looked chaotic and out of place. Dugout canoes, used by the villagers to fish for tuna, were strewn across fallen trees half a mile from the waterline. Some houses were left in shambles, while others stood in seemingly perfect shape but missing the stilts that once held them up. A hand-painted sign, torn from its moorings, read: “Sister Celia’s St. Clare’s Convent, Aitape, Papua New Guinea.”

Seen from the air, the devastation punched a clean hole in the northern New Guinean coastline, with deep green jungle and tidy homes giving way suddenly to chaos and disorder.

“It was like a bulldozer pushing down on me,” said Steven Kokomba, a tractor mechanic visiting Warapu when the waves struck. “Some of the people could swim, but some of the people could not swim.”

His young daughter, Katy, drowned.

For all the misery of the past four days, some people still found reason to give thanks. Shirley Munbret, 45, of Warapu felt the earth tremble Friday and went on cooking dinner. She never heard the sound of the approaching wave.

When it hit, the wave swept her house into Sissano Lagoon. She never saw her husband again, but her two children, Terrance and Otilla, survived by clinging with her to the wall of the house.

“My house was swept away,” said Munbret, her head swathed in a bandage, “but I held on to my kids.”

Munbret said she had probably seen the last of Warapu: “We are moving inland. There are bad spirits in the village.”