Floods claim 50 lives, wipe out crops
Floods claim 50 lives, wipe out crops
JAKARTA (JP): At least 50 people were killed and 43 others are still missing in floods that swept through North Sumatra, Bengkulu and Central Java during the past week.
Although officially the dry season has already begun in Indonesia, some parts of the country have continued to receive unusually high rainfall and unexpected flash floods.
Besides claiming dozens of lives, the floods have left large tracts of rice paddies under water and thousands of people homeless, according to reports received in Jakarta yesterday.
South Tapanuli in North Sumatra has been worst affected by the flooding, with 44 people dead and 21 people missing. Some of the casualties were buried alive in a landslide that resulted from the incessant rain last Thursday.
"The Search and Rescue Agency team is still working to find the missing people," Sarmadan Harahap, the spokesman for the regency administration, told The Jakarta Post by phone yesterday.
The team had recovered 42 bodies by Friday but had managed to find only two more over the weekend, he said.
More than 5,000 people in 20 villages in the Sipiongan and Labuhan Batu districts fled their homes because of the floods which struck the two areas on Thursday, Sarmadan said. Rice fields and rubber plantations had also been inundated, he added.
Sarmadan said the North Sumatra provincial social office had sent 16 tons of rice and consignments of clothes, blankets and medicines to the area.
He said arbitrary felling of the forest in the area had contributed to the disaster in the regency. The regency administration has appealed to the central government to tighten the regulations governing timber companies operating in the area, he added.
Bengkulu
In Bengkulu, six people are confirmed dead and 22 others are still missing after flashfloods swept through the regency of Rejang Lebong following torrential rain during the weekend, Antara reported.
The floods, which affected 10 villages in the regency, also inundated some 2,500 hectares of rice fields and sent hundreds of families scrambling to reach higher ground.
There were no reports of casualties in the floods that struck 35 villages in the coastal town of Cilacap, Central Java, over the weekend.
But overland transportation routes between Central Java and West Java were cut as the Cibeureum, Cikoneng, Cijalu and Cilopadang rivers overflowed.
At least 1,800 houses were inundated and more than 6,000 people were evacuated, according to officials.
Cilacap Regent Mohammad Soepardi toured the affected area yesterday, meeting with and consoling the flood victims in their temporary shelters. (rms/wah)