Five killed, widespread damage reported after cyclone hits Fiji

Five people are reported to have been killed and remote villages were feared to have sustained heavy damage after what was described as the most powerful tropical cyclone to hit Fiji tore through its islands.

Residents of Fiji, tourists and aid workers began the cleaning up and assessment of damages after category five Cyclone Winston battered the South Pacific nation with wind gusts as strong as 325km/h and waves up to 12m high.

George Dregaso, a shift leader at Fiji’s National Disaster Management Office, said on Sunday that two people on Ovalau Island died when the house they were sheltering in collapsed on them. Another man died on Koro Island and police were investigating reports of two more deaths on the main island of Viti Levu.

However, the full extent of the dead and wounded remains unknown as officials were still trying to establish communications and road access to the hardest-hit areas. Many fear that casualty numbers will increase once reports come in from outlying islands and from so-called "squatter areas" where shanty-standard housing was unlikely to have withstood the category 5 storm.

Cyclone Winston hit Fiji on Saturday with wind speeds estimated at up to 285km/h. It destroyed hundreds of homes and shredded crops. The worst-affected areas were along the northern coast of the main island, Viti Levu.

A 30-day state of natural disaster was declared on Sunday, a curfew was extended and police were empowered to make arrests without a warrant in the interest of public safety.

About 80% of the nation’s 900,000 people were without regular power, although a third of those were able to use generators. Telephone landlines were down but most mobile networks were working.

 “Some villages have reported that all homes have been destroyed,” Jone Tuiipelehaki of the United Nations Development Programme tweeted late on Saturday. “Fifty homes have been reported destroyed in the Navaga village in Koro Island.”

Australia’s foreign minister, Julie Bishop, offered Fiji assistance, including an Australian defence force P-3 Orion to carry out aerial surveillance of the outer islands.

Cyclone Winston began to make landfall on the main island of Vitu Levu after a national curfew took effect at 6pm local time on Saturday. It had earlier sunk boats and caused flash flooding on the nation’s outer islands, including Vanua Levu.

The country’s prime minister, Frank Bainimarama, said on Saturday that the government was prepared to deal with a potential crisis.

“As a nation we are facing an ordeal of the most grievous kind,” he wrote. “We must stick together as a people and look after each other.”

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said it had an emergency response team on standby, but that Bainimarama had not yet asked for help.