The Tonga track has been cleared of volcanic ash, support flights will resume News

A telecommunications blackout has made it even more difficult to help the volcanic island.

Tonga has removed a thick layer of ash from an international runway and cleared the way for emergency relief, a submarine telecommunications cable linking the nation to the disaster-stricken world will take at least a month to fix.

UN Crisis Coordinator Jonathan Veitch told AFP that the track on the main island of the Pacific Kingdom, once buried in five to 10 cm ash volcanoes, was running again.

“It’s cleaned up but it’s not used yet,” Tonga said, adding that Tonga could receive a number of suspended flights from Thursday.

In recent days, Australia and New Zealand have had C-130 military transport aircraft loaded with supplies. But their departure was repeatedly delayed due to the threat posed by ash particles to modern jet aircraft, including melting and accumulating in engines.

The Tongan government has called for an emergency eruption of a submarine volcano Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai reported an “unprecedented catastrophe” and a 15-meter wave that destroyed almost every home on some remote islands.

Two New Zealand navy vessels will arrive in Tongan on Friday with critical water supplies. The World Health Organization has expressed concern about ash and dust pollution from air pollution and food and water supply pollution.

The Red Cross said its Tongan groups had confirmed that the tsunami’s salt water and volcanic ash were polluting the drinking water sources of tens of thousands of people.

“The water supply across Tonga has been greatly affected by the ash and salt water of the tsunami,” said Katie Greenwood of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Associations.

Greenwood added that there is a “higher risk of developing diseases such as cholera and diarrhea.”

There were also United Nations agencies and aid agencies preparing rescue flights UN Pacific Coordinator Jonathan Veitch, the UN coordinator for Fiji, said that the Pacific island nation but no workers are landing, so as not to prevent the introduction of coronaviruses.

Tonga is one of the few countries without COVID in which the outbreak would be disastrous, he added.

Communication blackout

It has been caused by tsunami waves major damage To the three small islands of Tonga, with a submarine telecommunication cable.

A specialist ship will set sail from Port Moresby on a repair trip this weekend, according to Samiuela Fonua, president of cable owner Tonga Cable Ltd.

But after nine days of sailing equipment in Samoa, he said he would be “lucky” to get the job done in a month.

The international mobile phone provider Digicel has set up a 2G connection using a satellite dish, according to the New Zealand Foreign Ministry, but it is small and is about 10 per cent of normal capacity.

Tongan communities abroad have posted pictures of families on Facebook, giving a view of the devastation, reduced houses to rubble, fallen trees, cracked roads and sidewalks, and everything covered in gray ash.

The blackout in communications is further complicating relief efforts and underscores the weakness of submarine fiber optic cables that have become the focus of global telecommunications.

The $ 34 million cable funded by the Asian Development Bank and the World Bank ended in 2018 and increased Tonga’s net speed by more than 30 times, but it is almost the only link to the world.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said on Tuesday that it was negotiating with Kacific, which has a satellite over the Tonga archipelago, to access a satellite Internet connection.