14 February 2018 10:24 am
WELLINGTON REUTERS Feb 13-Emergency services in Tonga were working to reopen roads on Tuesday and assess what assistance they may need after Cyclone Gita tore across the Pacific island nation in the middle of the night. There were no confirmed reports of deaths from the Category 4 storm, but there were a lot of injured people, some seriously, said Graham Kenna, an Australian government adviser at Tonga’s National Emergency Management Office. The clean-up began in the early hours of the morning as the tail of the cyclone was still over the capital, Nuku’alofa, with soldiers clearing roads “We needed the roads cleared firstly so that we could get people that needed to get medical attention, and so that our assessment teams could get out,” Kenna told Reuters in a telephone interview.