PAPUA NEW GUINEA – Emergency response teams are being flown by helicopter to a remote part of Papua New Guinea – a region already struggling to recover from a magnitude-7.5 quake which hit in February.

Four deaths have been confirmed in Hela Province after Saturday’s 6.3-magnitude earthquake which struck near the capital Tari.

People in the area have become used to the aftershocks which have rocked the Highlands since February’s earthquake, but the deputy administrator of Hela Province, Pius Pape, said the weekend’s tremor made it feel like the disaster was happening again.

“I was here on the ground and you know, I was shaken up. It was as bad as the last earthquake,” he said.

Many people living near the epicentre of February’s earthquake have fled to larger villages on ridges in the hope of avoiding being buried in landslides.

But Bill Hamblin, PNG’s emergency controller, said some of those ridges may have slipped further away, so the earthquake might have caused fatalities in remote areas.

“There were some villages precariously placed on the top of these ridges where the landslides had occurred,” he said.

“Certainly they could have gone over the edge with another earthquake there.”

Authorities have been unable to contact people in those villages since the new quake. They will have to wait until teams can be sent there by helicopter.

Dr Hamblin said if the latest tremor had caused more landslides, they would exacerbate the water pollution problem which was affecting hundreds of thousands of people.

The streams and rivers from the quake zone flow into the Fly River, one of Papua New Guinea’s largest and most important river systems.

“We flew over that the other day and it’s full of mud, it’s like a mud pie, it’s just so thick with mud,” Dr Hamblin said.

“This will just increase that silt and continue it.

“As a result of that there’s no oxygen in the river and all the fish, crocodiles, turtles are dying in that river.”

Another huge problem confronting PNG authorities has been increasing violence and lawlessness in the earthquake zone with tribal warfare in the hills being displaced to the towns by the earthquake.

At least 12 people were killed in tribal fighting in the town of Tari in the past week, and health workers were evacuated from the provincial hospital where survivors of the violence were being treated.

Soldiers are guarding the hospital, and a defence force medical team has been sent in to keep it running.

The violence has affected other relief efforts.

Gianluca Rampolla, the United Nations resident coordinator in PNG, said a UN worker was injured when an aid convoy was attacked in the Southern Highlands on Saturday.

“They got blocked on the street by a mob and their convoy, which was escorted by both police and the PNG defence force, was attacked with stones and machetes and one UNICEF person was wounded on his head,” he said.

Rampolla said most aid workers had been forced to leave areas closest to the quake epicentre because of the violence.

He said the latest quake was a further complication for relief agencies, which were already struggling with many problems in the disaster zone.

“The trauma is still happening and this is making things only worse,” he said.

“It might have an impact on continued displacement, while we were hoping we would be able to start bringing communities back to their villages.

“And again, this is compounded by the security situation that doesn’t allow us to actually operate. - ABC