As aid trickles into the South Pacific nation of Tonga, devastated by a volcanic eruption and tsunami, an Australian aid flight was forced to return to base due to a positive COVID-19 case onboard, a defence official said on Friday.
As help from abroad started arriving, an Australian aid flight was forced to return to base because of a positive COVID-19 case onboard, underlining the complexity of a contactless humanitarian mission to one of the few countries that has kept the coronavirus at bay.
"We are cleaning the ash and have been since Monday," said Branko Sugar, 61, who runs a bottle shop and fishing charter business from Nuku'alofa."We only have the tap water, and it's been contaminated. We... can hardly breathe for all the dust." NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center has said the force of the last Saturday's eruption was estimated to be equivalent to five to 10 megatons of TNT, or more than 500 times that of the nuclear bomb the United States dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima at the end of World War Two.
"I opened the window shutter to see if we could see any effects of the eruption, and saw this dramatic, high-altitude plume blocking out the sun," Barron said on Facebook.United Nations spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric told a briefing that Tonga has asked for urgent assistance.