He climbed a tree to escape but when he got down another big wave swept him away, he said. Folau said he is disabled and cannot walk properly.
“I just floated, bashed around by the big waves that kept coming,” he told the radio station.
Folau said he kept floating, and slowly managed to swim 7.5 kilometres to the main island of Tongatapu, reaching the shore 27 hours later at about 10 p.m. on Sunday.
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Meanwhile, Tonga’s infamous shirtless Olympic flagbearer has been working hard to help his country, raising more than half-a-million dollars in relief funds so far.
Pita Taufatofua, 38, set up a GoFundMe page earlier this week, reports CBS News.
“Going forward will be a long hard battle as we try to find ways to creatively meet local needs whilst building up even stronger,” he wrote in an update on Thursday.
Taufatofua has also been posting to his Instagram account, where he shared that he is waiting to hear from family members that are still unaccounted for on some of Tonga’s smaller islands.
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The Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano erupted with a blast heard 2,300 kilometres away in New Zealand and sent tsunami waves across the Pacific Ocean.
James Garvin, chief scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said the force of the eruption was estimated to be equivalent to five to 10 megatons of TNT, an explosive force more than 500 times the nuclear bomb dropped by the United States on Hiroshima, Japan, at the end of the Second World War.
– With files from the Associated Press and Reuters
© 2022 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
