CNN news 2015-03-19 加文本

cnn news 2015-03-19

CARL AZUZ, HOST: Happy Saint Patrick`s Day.

I`m Carl Azuz.

cnn STUDENT NEWS is kicking off another 10 minutes of commercial-free coverage.

Authorities are slowly combing over the South Pacific nation of Vanuatu. It has 83 small island. About 65 of them are inhibited and it just suffered one of the most powerful storms ever to make landfill.

Tropical Cyclone Pam was a category five storm. At one point, it had sustained wind speeds of 165 miles per hour.

It raked over Vanuatu for 24 hours last weekend. At least 24 lives were lost, but officials don`t know yet the full extent of the damage. They think this could be one of the worst disasters ever seen in the Pacific.

International aid is coming in slowly, but it`s hard to get to the islands. The fact that radio and phone communications have been knocked out is just one of the problems hampering recovery efforts.

IVAN WATSON, cnn CORRESPONDENT: Just trying to get a sense of the scale of the damage here in a country that has more than 80 islands, some of them very difficult to reach right now, is very hard to do. We`ve just been trying to survey some of the extent of the damage here in the capital, Port Villa.

(voice-over): It takes a view like this to give you a sense of the sheer power of the wind of Cyclone Pam when she ripped through here on Friday night, tearing trees in half and damaging nearly every building in this area. Some houses were quite simply flattened.

Fortunately, residents tell me nobody in this neighborhood was hurt in this terrible storm. And that`s due, in large part, to training and preparation.

Where was everybody on the night of the storm?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Everybody was inside the evacuation center.

WATSON: This church right here?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This church building, yes.

WATSON: And that was part of a plan.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Of course, that was part of the plan which we -- the training that we had. And the church is just like a mini -- a main evacuation center due to cyclones.

WATSON: Do you think that saved lives?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Of course it did.

WATSON: The church is still serving as a temporary shelter for dozens of people from this community. There is still no electricity three days after the storm. There is still no running water. And untold thousands and thousands of people made homeless.

And a bigger problem is nobody really knows the extent of the damage or the potential loss of life on dozens of other islands of Vanuatu, one of the poorest countries in the Pacific.

What -- what`s striking is people -- many of them have had their homes destroyed. Some of these people, they rely on subsistence farming, basically for food. They`ve had their farms destroyed, estimated some 80 percent of these subsistence farms on one of the main islands here, Tanna, destroyed. So people are spending what little money they have to buy some rice and -- and they`re going to run out of those funds, as well.

That gives you a sense of how difficult this -- a challenge this is going to be for this, really one of the poorest countries in the Pacific.

AZUZ: UNICEF, the United Nations fund to help children worldwide, says 60,000 kids in Vanuatu need help. It`s among the church groups, government and international aid organizations that are sending assistance to Vanuatu.

cnn`s Impact Your World site has a list of these groups. For ideas on how and where you can contribute, cnn.com/impact is a good starting point.