http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/vanuatu-must-start-over-following-cyclone-pam-president-says-1.2995731The Pacific island nation of Vanuatu has lost years of development progress and must "start over" after Cyclone Pam destroyed or damaged 90 per cent of the buildings on the main island of Port Vila, the country's president said Monday.
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Lonsdale said that the limited information he was able to get from home showed six people confirmed dead on Port Vila after the category 5 typhoon smashed across the Vanuatu archipelago. He said information from other islands was not available because most communication links were still not working.
"This is a very devastating cyclone in Vanuatu," Lonsdale said. "I term it as a monster, a monster. It's a setback for the government and for the people of Vanuatu. After all the development that has taken place, all this development has been wiped out."
The president said because of the break in communications, even he could not reach his family. "We do not know if our families are safe or not. As the leader of the nation, my whole heart is for the people, the nation."
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Sune Gudnitz, regional head of the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs, said he was particularly worried about the densely populated volcanic island of Tanna in the south. Nothing had been heard from the island, which has a population of about 29,000 people, he said.
And these sorts of things are only going to get worse.
(I don't feel like looking around various wingnut sites to see what they have to say about this. Probably something about how Tanna has been destroyed because they thought
Prince Philip is God, or about how this is God's wrath being brought upon Vanuatu for legalizing homosexual intercourse, even though the cyclone hit Kiribati, where male homosexuality is illegal, though not female, and the Solomons, where it's all illegal.)
