Ruinous floods and landslides have killed more than 900 people on Indonesia’s island of Sumatra, the country’s disaster management agency said Saturday, with fears that starvation could send the toll even higher.
A chain of tropical storms and monsoonal rains has pummelled Southeast and South Asia, triggering landslides and flash floods from the Sumatran rainforest to the highland plantations of Sri Lanka.
More than 1,790 people have been killed in natural disasters unfolding across Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam over the past week.
In Indonesia’s provinces of Aceh and North Sumatra, floods have swept away roads, smothered houses in silt, and cut off supplies.
Aceh governor Muzakir Manaf said response teams were still searching for bodies in ‘waist-deep’ mud.
However, starvation was one of the gravest threats now hanging over remote and inaccessible villages.
‘Many people need basic necessities. Many areas remain untouched in the remote areas of Aceh,’ he told reporters. ‘People are not dying from the flood, but from starvation. That’s how it is.’
Entire villages had been washed away in the rainforest-cloaked Aceh Tamiang region, Muzakir said.
Aceh Tamiang flood victim Fachrul Rozi said he had spent the past week crammed into an old shop building with others who had fled the rising waters.
Aceh resident Munawar Liza Zainal said he felt ‘betrayed’ by the Indonesian government, which has so far shrugged off pressure to declare a national disaster.
Declaring a national disaster would free up resources and help government agencies coordinate their response.
Analysts have suggested Indonesia could be reluctant to declare a disaster—and seek additional foreign aid—because it would show it was not up to the task.
Indonesia’s government this week insisted it could handle the fallout.
The scale of devastation has only just become clear in other parts of Sumatra as engorged rivers shrink and floodwaters recede.
AFP photos showed muddy villagers salvaging silt-encrusted furniture from flooded houses in Aek Ngadol, North Sumatra.
Humanitarian groups worry that the scale of the calamity could be unprecedented, even for a nation prone to natural disasters.
Indonesia’s death toll rose to 908 on Saturday, according to the disaster management agency, with 410 people missing.
Disaster-hit Sri Lanka has unveiled a major compensation package to rebuild homes damaged by a deadly cyclone, even as the island prepared on Saturday for further landslides and flooding.
The government has confirmed 611 deaths, with another 213 unaccounted for and feared dead, in what President Anura Kumara Dissanayake has called the country’s most challenging natural disaster.
The disaster management centre issued fresh landslide warnings in several areas of the worst-affected Central Province, with the northeast monsoon gathering over the island and bringing more rain.
More than two million people—nearly 10 per cent of the population—have been affected by last week’s floods and landslides, the worst this century.
Survivors will be offered up to 10 million rupees to buy land in a safer location and build a new house, the finance ministry said in a statement late on Friday.
They will also receive livelihood support, including cash to pay for children’s school books, kitchen appliances, bedding and rent if they are not given accommodation by the state.
The government did not say how much the bold package would cost, a concern given the country’s recent economic turbulence.
Thailand has reported 276 deaths and Malaysia two, while at least two people were killed in Vietnam after heavy rains triggered a series of landslides.
Seasonal monsoon rains are a feature of life in Southeast Asia, flooding rice fields and nourishing the growth of other key crops.
However, climate change is making the phenomenon more erratic, unpredictable and deadly throughout the region.
Environmentalists and Indonesia’s government have also suggested that logging and deforestation exacerbated landslides and flooding in Sumatra.
