Clothes are seen laid out to dry as Adrian Banga surveys his destroyed house in Vanuatu's capital Port Villa.

Clothes are seen laid out to dry as Adrian Banga surveys his destroyed house in Vanuatu’s capital Port Villa. Image by (AAP Image/Dave Hunt)

Relief workers who have struggled for days to access remote areas of Vanuatu that were ravaged by a fierce cyclone finally reached some of the islands today.

Radio and telephone communications with the South Pacific nation’s hard-hit outer islands were just beginning to be restored, but remained patchy three days after what the country’s president called a “monster” storm.

Australian military planes that conducted aerial assessments of the outer islands found significant damage, particularly on Tanna Island, where it appears that more than 80% of homes and other buildings were partially or completely destroyed, foreign minister Julie Bishop said.

“We understand that the reconnaissance imagery shows widespread devastation,” she said. “Not only buildings flattened – palm plantations, trees. It’s quite a devastating sight.”

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported that 11 people were confirmed dead, including five on Tanna Island, lowering their earlier report of 24 casualties after realising some of the victims had been counted more than once.

Officials with the National Disaster Management Office said they had no accurate figures on how many were dead, and aid agencies reported varying numbers.

The confusion over how many died in the storm reflects the difficulty officials face as they try to deal with a disaster spread across many remote islands amid a near-total communications blackout.

Relief workers have been fighting poor weather and communications issues for days, hampering much of their efforts to reach the outer islands.

A break in the weather today gave them a chance to try again, though access remained difficult. Most of the islands have no airports and those that do have only small landing strips that are tricky for large supply planes to navigate.

(Press Association)