Foreign Minister Murray McCully says the aerial view of the aftermath of Cyclone Winston in Fiji was like "an endless sea of aeroplane crashes."
Mr McCully visited Fiji yesterday and said the situation was "grim" and reconstruction would take a long time.
"You're talking roofs taken off houses completely, some places where there is just a platform left on a house. So it was like flying over an endless sea of aeroplane crashes where you've got a centre where a house used to be and then a trail of debris around it. The landscape is like that for kilometres and that wasn't even the worst part of Fiji."
Parliamentarians spoke about the disaster in Parliament today during a motion on Tropical Cyclone Winston. Prime Minister John Key said by the end of this week there will be 400 personnel in Fiji helping out and the Defence Force was making daily drops of supplies and disaster specialists, such as medical staff. "New Zealand's response to Cyclone Winston is shaping up to be our largest humanitarian response in the Pacific."
He said the cyclone resulted in significant loss of life, property and crops and it had impacted on about 40 per cent of Fiji's population. "In some places the devastation is complete." He said more than 160 tons of emergency goods had been sent over, from shelter kits and water to food and blankets.