Glen Craig, chair of the Vanuatu Business Resilience Council, told the BBC that he had been in “good spirits” and enjoying the Christmas festivities with his wife on Tuesday when the earthquake struck – catching them completely off guard.
“We [in Vanuatu] are used to disasters… you can usually hear the earthquakes coming; you hear like a rumble or a deep roar. But this one we had no warning at all – there was just a sudden boom. This was next level, it felt like something that comes once in a generation.”
At least 10 buildings in Port Vila sustained “major structural damage”, the government’s disaster management office said. Tremors from the earthquake also cut power and mobile services.
Mr Craig said one building that housed several embassies, including the US Embassy and the British High Commission, was particularly affected.
“That building just pancaked,” he said. “There were about seven or eight buildings [in that area] that suffered catastrophic failure, and I’d expect the number of casualties to rise.”
A barrage of aftershocks were also reported overnight.
“Loads and loads of aftershocks throughout the night,” Australian Caroline Bird, who manages a resort in Port Vila, told ABC News. “Probably [can’t] even count how many.”
Six victims died as a result of a landslide, while four others had been in a collapsed building at the time of the quake. The death toll is expected to rise further.
Two of the 14 victims were Chinese nationals, Chinese Ambassador to Vanuatu Li Minggang told state media.
Photos shared by Vanuatu Police on Facebook showed rescuers sifting through rubble by hand and crawling under the floors of collapsed buildings.
Michael Thompson was among those who worked through the night looking for survivors.
He said in a Facebook post that three people had been rescued from a building overnight, but later told news agencies that one of them had subsequently died.
Mr Thompson added that rescue teams were in urgent need of jackhammers, excavators and cold drinking water, adding that many rescuers had “worked through the night”.
An estimated 116,000 people could be affected by the worst impacts of the quake, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said.
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