Three Canadians still unaccounted for in Vanuatu following Cyclone Pam

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The federal government is still trying to reach three Canadians who may have been living in Vanuatu when Cyclone Pam smashed into the South Pacific archipelago a week ago.

Officials at Canada's High Commission in Canberra are trying to contact the three through "any available means," including enlisting help from Australian bureaucrats in Vanuatu's capital of Port Vila, according to a spokesman for the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada. He said 43 Canadians were believed to be living in Vanuatu when the storm hit, but wouldn't say why it has taken so long to contact the three or if they are thought to be in trouble.

Carol Dover, an anthropologist working in Port Vila, says it took the Canadian government four days to send an e-mail checking whether she was okay after the Category 5 cyclone devastated her adopted home late Friday and early Saturday of last weekend. Ms. Dover was in Toronto at the time, visiting family and frantically took to Facebook to see who had survived. When she signed in, she noticed an alert from the social-media platform asking her to complete a "safety check" stating that she was okay. She also had the option to verify that other Facebook friends on the islands had survived. Soon she and a friend in the Vanuatu capital – using a portable generator – were reaching out to friends.

Dan McGarry, an Ottawa-born IT specialist and long-time Port Vila resident, said he did not know who the three unaccounted-for Canadians were but was pleasantly surprised by the Facebook prompt. "To see a corporation act like that, especially when these behemoths can often seem rather impersonal and frankly quite Big Brotherish, that's a really welcome sign," Mr. McGarry said.

Facebook Canada spokeswoman Meg Sinclair wouldn't say how many users on Vanuatu accessed the safety check, but said the company had also used the feature after Typhoon Ruby hit the Philippines last December.

Ms. Dover wondered why friends and family across the world knew she was fine via Facebook days before the Ottawa contacted her. "It's a super-duper technology that's existing and I just think they need to get on board with it," Ms. Dover said.

Meanwhile, the official death toll rose to 13 on Friday and Mr. McGarry, who is on a short-term contract helping UNICEF with communications and logistics, said 30,000 households "across dozens of islands" need food aid to give them sustenance for a minimum of six months as they replant their subsistence crops.

Earlier this week, a group of doctors from Victoria started an online fundraising campaign to rebuild the lone hospital on the southern island of Tanna. . The non-profit Victoria-Vanuatu Physician Project had been sending volunteers to staff the rudimentary hospital for 24 years. The group is also lobbying the federal government to deploy the Canadian military's Disaster Assistance Response Team to help the 30,000 people on Tanna access clean water and primary medical care. The main crops of island cabbage and root vegetables such as manioc and taro have been wiped out, affecting the 80 per cent of the island's population who subsist on them, according to the group.

Canada is waiting for a further assessment of the damage before it decides whether to commit more funds to the relief effort, a federal spokesman said. Canada has so far pledged $160,000, which critics say is a relatively tiny amount compared with the $6.5-million raised by other Commonwealth nations.