Fiji cyclone update: ‘An ordeal of the most grievous kind’

Desdemona Despair

By Mike Hawke and Lloyd Ashton
15 March 2016

(Anglican Taonga) – Simione Ravu, aged 66, is a lucky man.

Well, lucky may not be quite the word to describe someone who lost his home – and practically everything he owned – when Tropical Cyclone Winston rampaged through Fiji on 20 February.

But Winston killed 44 Fijians, and it’s a sheer miracle that Simione wasn’t the 45th.

Simione is one of 168 people who live in the remote Anglican village of Maniava [also known as Maniyava] in the province of Ra, on Fiji’s main island of Viti Levu.

Maniava sits high on a hillside at the mouth of a valley, and on the night of 20 February the winds being funnelled up that valley were epic – meteorologists say Winston’s winds gusted up to 300km/h.

The winds had been building throughout the day, and at about 6 pm Simione clustered his family around him in his simple corrugated iron home.

By now the howling wind was thick with flying foliage and timber – for hundreds of square kilometres the forests of northern Viti Levu have been stripped bare – and roofing iron was scything through the storm. […]

Nearly 25,000 homes were damaged or destroyed by the cyclone, and about 350,000 people – that’s roughly 40 percent of Fiji’s population – suffered serious loss of some sort.

Eighty percent of Fijians lost electric power, and getting power back to places like Maniava will take months – the lines are down, and the concrete power poles are snapped, for mile after mile.

The carnage is not restricted to Fiji either.

Cyclone Winston smacked Tonga twice within a few days, and 200 homes on the island of Vava’u are damaged, and 95 percent of the banana crop there has been destroyed. […]

In the days before Cyclone Winston hit Fiji, as it went on its crazy looping course around the Pacific, and then doubled back towards Fiji, Fijian Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama urged his fellow countrymen and women to prepare for the worst.

“As a nation,” he warned, “we are facing an ordeal of the most grievous kind.” [more]

‘An ordeal of the most grievous kind’ – Fiji cyclone update