Tongan recounts deafening volcanic blast as thousands fled for safety

‘All our families, were just running away from the Kolovai area, because the Kolovai is right beside the seashore,’ a resident said, explaining Saturday’s chaotic scenes

Meanwhile, a New Zealand flight carrying relief supplies arrived in Tonga days after the island was hit by a volcanic eruption and tsunami

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A damaged area in Tonga’s Nuku’alofa following Saturday’s volcanic eruption and tsunami near the Pacific archipelago. Photo: Broadcom Broadcasting via AP

Published: 1:51pm, 20 Jan 2022Updated: 3:30pm, 20 Jan 2022

When Tonga’s Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano violently erupted, sending shock waves and tsunami across the Pacific, the blast in the small island nation was so deafening that fleeing families could only wave at their loved ones to run.

“The first explosion … our ears were ringing and we couldn’t even hear each other, so all we do is pointing to our families to get up, get ready to run,” local journalist Marian Kupu said in one of the first eyewitness accounts to emerge from the South Pacific nation.

“We evacuated and then we, all our families, were just running away from the Kolovai area, because the Kolovai is right beside the seashore,” said Kupu, explaining the chaotic scenes just outside the capital Nuku’alofa on Saturday evening.

The explosion, which has killed at least three people, sent tsunami waves some 15m high crashing ashore on one small island and badly damaged villages, resorts and many buildings on others. It also cut domestic and overseas communications, severing an undersea internet cable.

Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Centre has said the force of the eruption was estimated to be the equivalent of five to 10 megatons of TNT, or more than 500 times that of the nuclear bomb the US dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima at the end of second world war.