Landslide!
Cape Tapaga, south coast, Upolu, Samoa
Sitting on the tail gate of
the 4WD having a quiet ciggy on Monday morning as we prepared
to leave after a few days at Vaiala Beach Cottages in Apia
[well, that is something of a misnomer, there is no "beach",
but a three metre sea wall made of black volcanic rock
boulders to protect the low-lying area from king tides and
storm surges during cyclones] and the bloke who appeared to be
the place's Boss Cocky came over for a chat.
[The joint is in a very
quiet, and by the looks of the adjacent village, a rather poor
neighbourhood of Apia...on a couple of acres, with seven
little run-down self-contained cottages arranged Samoa style
in a semi-circle around a central green with a huge mulberry
tree in the middle and a couple of kayaks leaning up against
it, coconut palms and banana trees, and a profusion of lush
tropical foliage including dozens of big clumps of fragrant
lemongrass.]
After asking me if everything
was OK during our stay..."perfect" I said "just what we
wanted, out of the way but close to town, we'll be back!"...I
mentioned that we'd been down to the south coast the day
before for a quiet Sunday lunch and swim at Siumu village.
He said "Have you seen the landslide?
"What landslide?"
"Oh it's huge. It's down
there by the Aleipata Islands. The whole mountain side just
fell away, cut the road and the whole thing went right across
the lagoon and ended up on the other side of the reef!
Massive, bru."
"Bloody hell!"
"Yeah, it's pretty huge."
stretching his log-like arms out as long as they could go.
"You've got to see it".
I asked if anyone knew why it
had happened and he said it collapsed just after Cyclone Gita
had moved through in March and dumped so much rain that down
town Apia was fully flooded as it's at the confluence of two
rivers and numerous small creeks [we saw some major flood
mitigation works going on at the mouth of the Vasigano River
just down the track from the container terminal, as the locals
had become sick and bloody tired of "AP City", as it's
jocularly known, continually flooding during the wet season].
He continued...."but the most
amazing thing about the landslide was that within half an hour
of it happening, local people had scrambled all over the rocks
and rubble right out to the end with their fishing rods and
nets and were hauling in big fat tuna's! It was amazing."
Later that day we swung the
4WD around in the extreme south-eastern corner of Upolu and
came across a sign that said "Detour ahead. Follow Road" and
there it was.
The whole mountainside cliff
face near Cape Tapaga had indeed collapsed - the 200+ metre
high sheer jungle covered escarpment is very close to the
coast there - and it had given way right on the point, sending
millions of tons of rock and mud a good half kilometre across
the lagoon. Most of the boulders of grey-to-black volcanic
rock were the size of small cars, but some were as big as
trucks, and someone had come along with a can of black paint
and sprayed on one boulder about seven feet high the words
SIGN OF END TIME.
The Main South Coast Road was
buried deep under the avalanche, and the Govt. had gone in
with heavy duty earth movers and did a massive job in pushing
the debris back from the reef and most of the lagoon, and
ramming it down to a solid flat platform an extraordinary
10-15 meters above sea level. A very narrow dirt track skirted
around the landslide to connect it to the two stretches of
bitumen on either side. The original road and electricity and
telephone lines remain buried under the landslide. You can
see the wires go under water and come up the other side - no
attempt had been made to string up a new set of poles and
wires across the slip.
The unstoppable power of
nature right there; but we were not at all prepared for what
was to come.
As we drove across the land
slide and then slowly along the coast through Vailoa,
Lalomanu, Saleapaga, Lepa, and Aufaga villages through to Vavau, a distance of about
13 kilometres, we were surrounded by tsunami ruins.
I had known about the 2009
Samoan tsunami disaster before were arrived on Upolu, but I
never expected to see so much damage nine years later.
Everywhere the ruins of
houses and fale tele, all now roofless with maybe only
a few concrete columns left standing or just snapped in half,
a couple of ruined churches here and there with maybe a wall
of glass-less windows left to be overgrown with jungle, but
mostly all that remained were raised flat concrete slabs with
nothing on them, where buildings used to be.
I was fascinated that the
villagers had decided to re-build right next to the ruins -
new churches, meeting houses and homes sit side-by-side with
devastation that's still crumbling - but I never did manage to
find out why. Was it all too hard and costly to repair the
ruins, or did they just leave them there as silent sentinels
to the tragedy? I don't know. In most villages, people are not
buried in the church-yard, tombs of formal masonry line the
path to the front door of many houses. The ancestors rest at
home. People used to live in those shattered places, so maybe
it was a good idea to leave them well alone?
123 people along that stretch
if coast died, many of them children who were swept out to
sea, their bloated bodies floating back to shore days, weeks
after the catastrophe. 16 people went missing and were never
found. Hundreds were badly injured. The village of Lepa was
completely flattened, and while there's a new sign post on
higher ground, nothing of the original village remains, apart
from the ruins. The Samoan PM's family came from Lepa. One of
his nieces died. He happened to be in Auckland at the time.
It happened right on dawn on
September 29, 2009, when the whole place shook and rolled with
a truly tremendous earthquake that was measured at an
extremely rare staggeringly powerful 8.3 on the opened ended
logarithmic Richter Scale, but no one there had ever
experienced a tsunami before so they had no idea what was
coming at them.
By some estimates the
stupendous wall of water arrived just nine minutes after the
earthquake; what sheer terror there must have been when
already panicked people saw the thing looming up at them out
of the ocean after they'd just had the livin' shit rattled
right out of them - the sound is beyond imagining as the
monster broke on the reef...and these people had no-where to
run, absolutely no-where to hide, they had to ride it
- the coastal plain is no more than 150 meters wide there at
best and the escarpment cliffs behind are sheer - it just goes
straight up, with very few, if any tracks [we saw a tsunami
escape route that had since been built where the escarpment is
at it's most vertical, and it's a tight zig-zag of railed
steps going up about 50 metres]. Everywhere you go there are
now dozens of new tsunami warning signposts with the symbol of
the "running man" pointing in the direction of any higher
ground.
After the tsunami, some
survey teams came along and calculated the height of the
tsunami wave at an astonishing 15 metres - that's higher than
a three-storey building - they calculated that rocks has been
scoured out of the cliff face at Manulamo village [near where
the recent landslide is] at a height of 49 feet above the
normal high tide sea level.
We snorkelled extensively in
the lagoon where we stayed at the Fao Fao Beach Fales in Lepa,
and you could see in the bright sun how the fringing reef had
been utterly smashed by the tsunami, the lagoon was chock full
of dead broken coral [which by and large is still not
regenerating even after nine years], and mingled among the
piles of ghostly white marine remnants there were hundreds of
bricks, bessar building blocks, chunks of concrete and twisted
concrete re-enforcing rods, that had been washed back into the
lagoon by the force of water as the tsunami receded. All very
eerie. No attempt, it seems, has been made to remove the
debris from the lagoon.
The tourism industry, once
the lifeblood of the area, also died instantly as you could
clearly see what would once have been beautiful coral gardens
reduced to underwater wastelands.
I was reminded of being so
lucky to experience snorkelling the reef on the south side of
Atauro Island in East Timor back in 2012, where it was like
swimming in the most perfect tropical aquarium, the brilliance
of the diversity of the corals was breath-taking [not a great
idea while snorkelling] and teeming with fish and technicolour
marine life. But those days have now most likely gone away.
The Great Barrier Reef used to be beyond belief, but is now a
shadow of its former self. I've seen the photographs of it
taken with the first high-def under-water colour camera's in
the 60's, but now its allegedly completely rooted. I haven't
been to see for myself in a while. But here - on a tiny speck
in the sheer vastness of the Pacific - how terrible is our
vulnerability, how insignificant are we?
You could sit on the beach
there with one of the very finest views in the world; a
picture postcard of paradise gazing along the striking coral
coast and the rocky little islands that rise straight out of
the ocean just offshore teeming with sea-birds, and never know
what lies beneath the water's edge.
The building and repair work
still goes on, and even in the amenities block at Fao Fao you
could see some original tiles on the concrete slab floor had
been cracked, crazed and ripped by the tsunami and had been
mortared back in place; they had just filled in the gaps with
some random new tiles, whacked up a few new mortared volcanic
rock walls around the the slab, put in a couple of new dunny
bowls connected to a new septic system, the showers were no
more than a single cold water tap on the end of a pipe.
Exactly what you need, for the moment, and nothing more.
After the tsunami, the
recovery effort was all done by locals after villagers from
villages on higher ground that escaped the devastation poured
into the area on foot to help; the Main South Coast Road was
gone and all power and communications were down. It took days
for the news to reach the outside world, and the New Zealand
Air force were first on the scene with air-drops, but it took
weeks for the New Zealand and Australian Navy's to turn up
with any kind of substantial aid. And then they were gone,
leaving the survivors to their own devices.
Most people who survived the
tsunami are deeply psychologically scarred by the event -
no-one will talk about it - if you ever mentioned that you
knew that a tsunami had hit the area back in '09, they would
simply say "oh yes" and then...no more. What is done is done,
and it is what it is.
A Peruvian woman we met at a
mountain-top art gallery over lunch one day near the strange
Baha'i temple outside Apia who has lived in Samoa for more
than 25 years said "everyone on Upolu was affected by it.
Everybody knew someone, whether through their own family, or
through clan affiliations or through inter-marriage, or just
friends, everybody knew someone who knew someone who had died
or been badly injured. Many of the survivors went mad - yes,
literally IN-SANE - and that was the end of it for them. Their
families are ashamed. So very very sad".
The Samoan Observer,
reported that only a week before we arrived in Samoa, some
Adventist missionaries has sent some teams of mental health
workers into the affected villages to try to get them to talk
about dealing with post-traumatic stress, and they were
impressed by the number of people who had attended the
workshops...they tried six months earlier and failed - no one
turned up - but this time some did, and one of the metal
health workers deemed it a success because "it is very
difficult for the villagers to 'open up' about this".
Only now.
Our
host at Fao Fao was at home at the time of the landslide and
didn't like it one little bit. Fran asked her if she heard
it seven kilometres away "It was like an explosion! Nobody
knew what happened. Everyone was very scared for a while. Oh
yes. It was a miracle no-one was killed or hurt, no-one was
driving by. Praise be. It happened in the middle of the
day, just like that".
A week after the tsunami
disaster the Govt. announced that the bodies of the victims
that had been found "who have not already been buried in their
villages" [that's hard to do when there is simply no village
left] would be interred in a mass grave in Apia at the
Tafaigata Cemetery.
A brief ecumenical service
was held before the mass internment, and the Govt. promised at
the time that a wall listing the names of all who died or were
lost in the tsunami, whether they were buried there or not,
would be constructed in memorium at the cemetery.
It was never built.
Fauatapu Island
seen from Amaile village, far east coast, Upolu, Samoa