Death toll in Malaysian storm increases to 127
Death toll in Malaysian storm increases to 127
KOTA KINABALU, Malaysia (Agencies): The death toll yesterday climbed to 127 after a tropical storm ripped the west cost of Malaysia's Sabah state in the country's worst natural disaster in recent years, officials said.
A total of 127 bodies had been recovered as of yesterday afternoon, 90 of whom had been identified -- 82 of them Indonesians and eight local Sabahans, hospital authorities said.
Some 70 people remained unaccounted for, police said, road and telecommunication lines to the affected districts have been severed, and an estimated 5,000 people have been left homeless.
About 30 injured people who were plucked out of muddy debris were admitted to the district hospital in the worst hit area of Keningau, in the remote interior of the state on Borneo island, hospital officials said.
"It is the worst natural disaster to have hit us," Information Minister Mohamed Rahmat, who is chairman of Malaysia's national natural disaster committee, told reporters after taking an aerial tour of the area.
Keningau is 131 kilometers southwest of Kota Kinabalu, the capital of Malaysia's eastern state.
The state capital was also strewn with toppled billboards, debris and submerged vehicles in the aftermath of the storm.
In Kuala Lumpur, Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad yesterday promised to help the victims and "take all appropriate actions." Mahathir, in a statement from the northern island resort of Langkawi where he is spending a year-end vacation, said he was shocked and saddened at the loss of more than 100 lives in the storm and extended his condolences to the families of the victims.
Meanwhile, Sabah police said a rescue team comprising 230 military and civilian personnel was continuing an intense search operation in four army helicopters, assisted on the ground by the navy, police and civil defense personnel.
Among the rescuers are 24 members of the so-called Special Malaysian Disaster Assistance and Rescue team (SMART), specially flown from Kuala Lumpur to Keningau yesterday to assist in the operations.
The team was formed in 1994 following the collapse of a highland condominium that killed 48 people, including 11 foreigners.
The team members, trained abroad in tunneling and using tracker dogs, were deployed by helicopter to Keningau.
The small logging town was the worst hit by the storm with 102 bodies pulled from fallen branches, along riverbanks and the debris of their collapsed homes.
Other victims were found in the neighboring towns of Papar, Tuaran and Kota Kinabalu.
"We believe that about 200 to 220 were hit when the storm struck a total of 524 mostly wooden houses in Keningau, Tuaran and outskirts of Kota Kinabalu," a police spokesman from the operations room monitoring the tragedy said.
Police believe most of the victims are local indigenous Muruts and Dusuns, Indonesians and Filipinos.
Although the storm had abated, the weather remained gloomy. Low-lying districts were yesterday directed to be on the alert as several small rivers in the interior were still rising.
Sabah meteorological department director Chang Kung Chew said that Thursday's storm was the worst to have pounded Sabah, going by the department's available records.
The danger posed by the storm is considered largely over, but coastal villages still face the threat of flooding as nearby rivers continue to rise, officials said.
Sabah chief minister Yong Teck Lee, who inspected the scene of the tragedy in a helicopter late Thursday, directed civil defense personnel and the state as well as district natural disaster committees to be activated to help in emergency relief.
Sabah has a population of 1.1 million, made up of numerous ethnic groups and roughly 70 percent of its mountainous surface is covered in forest. Its economy is based on its rich natural resources.