Cut off by volcano, Tongans relieved as contact restored

BANGKOK (AP) — As the massive undersea Hunga Tonga Hunga Ha’apai volcano erupted on Saturday, Tongans from around the world gazed on as their relatives livestreamed images of billowing clouds of ash, gas and steam emerging from beneath the depths.

Then darkness.

The eruption severed Tonga's single fiber-optic cable, rendering the entire Pacific archipelago offline and unable to communicate with the rest of the world — and leaving their loved ones terrified about what might have happened.

“It was absolutely crazy,” said Koniseti Liutai, a Tongan who lives in Australia.

“We were talking with family and relatives, because they were excitedly showing us the volcano's activities, then we heard the explosion and the big bang and everything went dark,” he said. “Then the next information we got was the tsunami warning and then the tsunami hitting; we were all absolutely fearing the worst.”

It wasn't only family and friends who could not get through. Huge ash clouds made backup communication by satellite phone next to impossible, and world leaders were not even able to get in touch with their Tongan counterparts to see what help they needed.

As the ash cleared, satellite communication improved and Tonga's telecoms operator, Digicel, said it had been able to restore international call services to some areas late Wednesday.

It cautioned, however, that due to the high number of calls and the limited capacity of its satellite link that people may need to try repeatedly to get through — something experienced by Liutai, who is deputy president of the Tonga Australia Chamber of Commerce.

“My first direct information was this morning,” he said Thursday. “My daughter, after 100 phone calls during the day and night, got through to my aunties, my mum's sisters, and we were in tears of...