Thread by @Telegraph

🇹🇴First images from surveillance planes flying over Tonga reveal “catastrophic” and “extensive” damage to villages in low-lying coastal parts of the archipelago.

A devastating volcanic eruption and a subsequent tsunami has caused untold devastation 👇
telegraph.co.uk/world-news/202…

➡️Photographs taken by the New Zealand Air Force emerged from Atata and Nomuka islands, where surveillance crews observed “a large number of buildings missing” and “multiple trees uprooted, with debris throughout”

The first of two confirmed deaths emerged on Monday but the real casualty figure in the tiny nation of about 100,000 people remains unknown.

Communications were cut off by the volcanic explosion and roads and the airport damaged

🚨A state of emergency has been declared in Tonga, but aid efforts face further complications due to strict Covid-19 restrictions that only allow Tongan citizens and permanent residents to enter

The eruption on the uninhabited volcanic island of Hunga-Tonga-Hunga-Ha’apai was so powerful that its impact was felt in Fiji and New Zealand and coastlines were flooded from Japan to California

🔴It was one of the largest recorded eruptions in decades, estimated by scientists to have exerted a force equivalent to 1,000 Hiroshima nuclear bombs and exploding 30 kilometres into the air and depositing ash, gas and acid rain across a swathe of the Pacific

Significant damage was reported along the western coast of Tonga’s main island of Tongatapu, where there are many vacation resorts.

The Ha’atafu Beach Resort, 13 miles west of Nuku’alofa, was “completely wiped out”, the owners said on Facebook

💬“Further volcanic activity cannot be ruled out,” OCHA said, reporting only minor injuries but emphasising that formal assessments, especially of the outer islands, had yet to be determined.

Read the full story 👇
telegraph.co.uk/world-news/202…