Helicopters `Core' to Earthquake Recovery in Papua New Guinea

(Bloomberg) -- Nine days after a massive earthquake and more than a hundred aftershocks shook Papua New Guinea -- including a 6.7 magnitude hit early Wednesday -- the Pacific nation is struggling to access villages cut off by landslides and secure safe drinking water.

For Sydney-based Oil Search Ltd., which has been operating in the country for almost 90 years, helicopters have become “core” to its efforts to bring supplies and equipment to impacted areas, Managing Director Peter Botten said Tuesday in a phone interview from the country. The company plans to have about 10 helicopters operating this week helping with relief, he said.

“I’ve not seen so much devastation from any natural event. There are substantial landslides, there are lots of polluted rivers,” Botten said. “The relief effort does come down to the ability to deliver materials by helicopter.”

At least 18 people were killed by the earthquake overnight, Reuters reported, citing William Bando, the Hela Province administrator. The country declared a state of emergency on March 1 in the affected areas. Papua New Guinea Red Cross estimates that at least 70 people have died and about 10,000 have been displaced since the initial 7.5 magnitude quake last week, according to Secretary General Uvenama Rova.

Food, water, clothing, medical supplies, shelter and communications are among the most important needs, Rova said in an interview Wednesday, with accessibility a challenge to get supplies to impacted populations.

The impact from the quake has also spread to global energy markets. Exxon Mobil Corp., one of Oil Search’s main partners in the country, has shut their jointly-owned $19 billion PNG LNG gas export plant, which accounts for about 3 percent of the world’s supply of liquefied natural gas, a supercooled form of the fuel shipped by tanker. Exxon said Monday the plant will be shut for eight weeks because of damage to upstream infrastructure, sending prices higher in Asia. It reiterated that timeline Wednesday.

Water tanks failed and plumbing and electricity were damaged at some of Oil Search’s 24 work sites, which combined house more than 2,000 people, Botten said Tuesday. While some of the company’s flow lines that bring hydrocarbons to processing facilities have been impacted by landslides and some well pads have had land slippage around them, production infrastructure managed the earthquake “pretty well,” he said.

“The actual oil and gas facilities were designed to manage significant earthquake and they have done that,” said Botten. “The challenge for us and others is the damage to the camp facilities, the mess and all the support infrastructure. That has been enormous.”

Oil Search doesn’t anticipate needing heavy lift aircraft to repair its energy infrastructure, according to Botten. The earthquake damaged about three-fourths of the nearby Komo airport runway, Frank Kretschmer, Exxon’s senior vice president for Asia-Pacific LNG Marketing, said in Singapore last week.

There are potentially seven active faults along the pipeline route between the Hides plant and Kopi, near the coast, according to an environmental impact statement for the Exxon-led PNG LNG project. The pipes were to be “designed to withstand earthquakes with a return frequency of 300 years” and should have “sufficient ductile strength to deform without rupturing under more severe shaking with a return frequency of 1,500 years.”

--With assistance from Stephen Stapczynski and Dan Murtaugh

To contact the reporters on this story: Aaron Clark in Tokyo at aclark27@bloomberg.net, Perry Williams in Sydney at pwilliams113@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Ramsey Al-Rikabi at ralrikabi@bloomberg.net, Aaron Clark

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