January 5, 2003	Sunday	Ziqa’ad 1, 1423

AUCKLAND, Jan 4: Fears over the fate of two Pacific islands cut off since being battered by a powerful cyclone last week eased Saturday after contact revealed there had been no fatalities.

The Polynesian island of Tikopia in the eastern Solomon Islands, and Moto Lava, part of Vanuatu, had been cut off from the outside world after Cyclone Zoe raged through the region on Saturday.

Freelance cameraman Geoff Mackley Friday flew from Vanuatu by helicopter to Tikopia on Friday to discover there were no fatalities among the island’s people.

From the Vanuatu capital Port Vila a French Navy Puma helicopter reached the island of Mota Lava to find that, while it too had been cut off all week, its inhabitants had survived unscathed.

However the fate of inhabitants on another island in the Solomons, Anuta, remained unclear Saturday as no contact had yet been made.

Zoe, at the top end of the storm severity scale, hit Tikopia and Anuta, home to some 3,000 people, on December 28.

Mackley, in a report for The Australian newspaper, said the Tikopia people had survived.

“Every single person was alive and there they were, standing in front of me,” Mackley said.

The New Zealander said locals running toward the aircraft with tales of survival greeted them.

“The whole way there I thought I would see hundreds of dead and festering bodies but instead we were just overwhelmed with people running toward the plane,” Mackley said.

Residents said they had enough warning of Zoe to hide in mountain caves that had been used for centuries to shelter from tropical storms.

But Mackley said the inhabitants were in urgent need of fresh water and salt, and there was a risk of disease spreading throughout the island. Villagers told Mackley the fruit they usually ate was ruined by the storm and their last water supply was contaminated by salt water and only available at low tide.—AFP