Vanuatu cyclone horror: Newborn baby and four foreigners among 24 dead

The baby died after 190mph winds ripped the roof off the Pakaroa Presbyterian church where its parents were sheltering.

A middle-aged man and a family of three, reported to be foreigners, were found dead in the harbour in the country's capital of Port Vila.

About 3,300 people are sheltering in evacuation centres, according to the UN, while it has been estimated hundreds of thousands are homeless.

Officials are still struggling to determine the scale of devastation from the 168 mile per hour cyclone, which tore through Vanuatu on Saturday.

Cyclone Pam has destroyed or damaged 90% of the buildings in the country's capital Port Vila alone, according to officials.

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

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.

"There are over 80 islands that make up Vanuatu and on a good, sunny day outside of cyclone season it's difficult to get to many of them," said Colin Collett Van Rooyen of Oxfam.

"Until today, the weather has been particularly cloudy, so even the surveillance flights would have had some difficulty picking up good imagery."

Teams of aid workers and government officials were planning to fly to the southern islands, including Tanna Island, which suffered a direct hit from the storm.

Vanuatu has a population of 267,000 people. About 47,000 people live in the capital.

In Port Vila, smashed boats littered the harbour, and sodden piles of household belongings tangled among twisted tree branches lay where some homes once stood.

Many of the city's residents were already beginning the rebuilding process, said the UN's Sebastian Rhodes Stampa.

"People are chopping trees and getting on with their lives; there's a lot of laughter at night," he said. "They're remarkably resilient people."