Rescuers yesterday searched for scores of people still missing after floods and landslides swept away villages in Indonesia and East Timor, killing more than 160 people and leaving thousands more homeless.
Torrential rains from Tropical Cyclone Seroja turned small communities into wastelands of mud, uprooted trees and sent about 10,000 people fleeing to shelters across neighboring Southeast Asian nations.
Indonesian National Disaster Mitigation Agency said that it had recorded 130 deaths in a cluster of remote islands near East Timor, where another 34 have been officially listed as dead since the disaster struck on Sunday.
Photo: AP
Search-and-rescue teams in Indonesia were racing to find more than 70 people still missing and using diggers to clear mountains of debris.
The storm swept buildings in some villages on Lembata down a mountainside and to the shore of the ocean — some small communities were obliterated.
“This area will never be inhabited again,” Lembata official Eliyaser Yentji Sunur said, referring to a flattened part of Waimatan village.
“We won’t let people live here. Like it or not, they’ll have to relocate,” he said.
Waimatan resident Onesimus Sili said that floods early on Sunday destroyed his community before anyone knew what was happening.
“Around midnight, we heard a very loud rumbling sound and we thought it was a nearby volcano erupting,” he said. “By the time we realized that it was a flash flood, the houses were already gone.”
Authorities in the two nations were scrambling to shelter evacuees, while trying to prevent the possible spread of COVID-19.
Yesterday, East Timor recorded its first virus death — a 44-year-old woman — since the COVID-19 pandemic broke out last year.
The tiny half-island nation of 1.3 million sandwiched between Indonesia and Australia quickly closed its borders to avoid a widespread outbreak.
However, the disaster has heightened fears of a spike in cases as thousands cram into shelters across the nation’s capital Dili and elsewhere.
Local officials in Lembata were bracing for its meagre health facilities to be overwhelmed as the number of injured coming from isolated villages soars.
“These evacuees fled here with just wet clothes on their backs and nothing else,” Lembata Deputy Mayor Thomas Ola Longaday said. “They need blankets, pillows, mattresses and tents.”
There was also a shortage of trained doctors.
“We don’t have enough anesthesiologists and surgeons, but we’ve been promised that help will come,” Longaday said. “Many survivors have broken bones because they were hit by rocks, logs and debris.”
Nearby in East Flores municipality, torrents of mud washed over homes, bridges and roads.
Earlier images from the Indonesian National Search and Rescue Agency showed workers digging up mud-covered corpses.
Hospitals, bridges and thousands of homes were damaged or destroyed by the storm, which has moved toward Australia.
However, Indonesia “could still see extreme weather for the next few days,” Indonesian National Disaster Mitigation Agency spokesperson Raditya Jati said.
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