By Alison Bevege
SYDNEY, March 4 (Reuters) - Almost a week after a deadlyquake struck the rugged Papua New Guinea highlands, nearly150,000 people remain in urgent need of emergency supplies asdamaged roads and landslides have hampered the delivery of aidto isolated communities, agencies have said.
The quake destroyed or damaged the homes of around 7000people, while 147,000 were in severe need of food, water andsanitation, the director of the International Red Cross in PNG,Udaya Regmi, told Reuters on Sunday.
Landslides have cut roads, preventing the delivery of aid toseveral places where it's most needed. challenge is road access, it's still not accessible totrucks and four-wheel drives," Regmi said.
"Big trucks cannot go there. It's one of the reasons thefood is becoming less and less. There are no fears of starvationyet but we've not got the full picture."
Papua New Guinea (PNG) declared a state of emergency acrossthe earthquake-hit region last week but the scale of thedisaster will not be known until relief workers and authoritiescan complete their assessments in the area.
A report by the World Food Program for the United Nationstwo days after the 7.5 magnitude quake hit the SouthernHighlands on February 26 estimated 465,000 people were exposedto the disaster of which 143,000 needed urgent humanitarianassistance and 64,000 were suffering from extreme foodinsecurity.
Anna Bryan, program director for CARE International in PNG,said the impact of the earthquake could not be understood by theinitial death toll of 31 people as tens of thousands of peopleuninjured by the actual quake have been cut off from food,drinking water, communications and medical help for a week.
"Public health and public hygiene are now concerns," shesaid.
Bryan said rivers dammed by landslides created stagnantwater polluted by silt and bacteria, leaving people with thethreat of disease.
Aid has been flown in by aircraft but it is not yet known ifit has been able to get to all the people in need.
Aftershocks terrified villagers for five days after theinitial temblor and only started subsiding on Saturday, multiplesources said.
Julie Sakol a nurse at Mendi General Hospital said onSunday the aftershocks were slowly decreasing.
"It's coming every two hours now ... the movement of theground is slowly going down."
Australian Sally Lloyd who is visiting PNG said villagerswere terrified by the constant shaking.
"It is terror," she said by telephone from Mount Hagen onSunday. "They think the end of the world is happening."
Earthquakes are common in Papua New Guinea, which sits onthe Pacific Ocean's "Ring of Fire," a hotspot for seismicactivity due to friction between tectonic plates.
The PNG and Australian governments, the Red Cross and CareInternational have all provided aid.
Energy firm ExxonMobil which had to declare force majeure onexports from its PNG LNG project in the wake of the earthquakehas also donated US$1 million to the humanitarian effort. company Santos said on Sunday that it will donateUS$200,000 to aid agencies in PNG for disaster relief on top ofa US$1 million donation it has already provided to HelaProvincial Hospital.