The Associated Press
JAKARTA, Indonesia
- This year's monsoon rains inundated the island of Sumatra on
Monday, triggering dozens of landslides and sweeping victims down
raging rivers.
The flooding
has killed more than 100 people. With dozens unaccounted for,
rescuers feared the death toll would rise on the Indonesian island.
"We are
looking for survivors, but we fear there will only be corpses,"
student volunteer Nanang Farid Syam said in the West Sumatran
capital of Padang.
Relief workers
said blocked and flooded roads and continuing rains were hampering
rescue efforts.
"There
are reports of landslides everywhere," said Jual Effendi,
head of the province's rescue service. He said at least 90 people
were feared dead in the region.
Effendi said
some food aid had reached the worst-affected areas in the provinces
of West Sumatra and Aceh on the northern half of the island, about
625 miles northwest of the nation's capital, Jakarta.
Landslides
in Indonesia are frequently caused by monsoon rain in areas where
land has been weakened by deforestation. Last month, floods and
landslides killed more than one hundred people in the country's
main island of Java.
The Jakarta
Post daily described the Sumatra flooding as the worst since 1953.
Power and
telephone lines in Aceh's capital, Banda Aceh, have been swept
away, leaving thousands of people in the town without electricity,
the Kompas newspaper reported.
To the south,
large parts of Padang were under as much as 9 feet of water, witnesses
said. Eight counties were partially inundated, and hundreds of
acres of rice paddies had been destroyed.
Many of the
victims were carried away by raging waters or buried under mud
and rock when sodden hillsides collapsed, said Endar, an official
of Indonesia's national search and rescue agency.
Endar, who
like many Indonesians uses only one name, said 53 bodies had been
found in other parts of Sumatra and that 71 people were still
missing.
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