The death toll after floods and landslides in Indonesia's South Sulawesi province earlier this week approached 200 yesterday as workers trawled through mud and scoured nearby islands for more bodies and survivors.
Most deaths occurred on Tuesday across five districts in the province, but search and rescue operations have been recovering bodies since then and struggling to reach some of the most isolated affected areas.
"The latest reports now show the death toll to be at 190, 175 of which came from Sinjai district alone," said Ruslan Effendi, an official at the provincial disaster management center in South Sulawesi's capital Makassar.
PHOTO: AP
He said eight people were reported killed in Bulukumba district, two in Bantaeng, four in Jeneponto and one in Bone.
Searching offshore
"Search and rescue teams continue to be deployed, mostly in Sinjai to look for the some 128 people still reported to be missing," Effendi said.
R. Harsono, who heads the search and rescue agency's operations in Sinjai, told reporters as he oversaw work in the waters of the Bay of Bone off North Sinjai that most of the search efforts were now focusing offshore.
"Most of the bodies have been swept to the sea and our search efforts are focused here. The number of bodies buried under rubble inland is relatively small," Harsono said.
He said a second rescue team, composed of marines, was combing the area around the Pulau Sembilan (Nine Islands), a district composed of scores of islands off the coast of Sinjai.
Harsono said rain-swollen rivers swept victims and debris into the Bay of Bone and the currents had carried them to Pulau Sembilan.
As he spoke, an ambulance left the coast carrying the body of a victim found by a team searching by rubber boat.
South Sulawesi Vice Governor Yasin Limp, who heads the province's disaster control task force, left the town of Sinaji by helicopter with other officials to visit isolated villages, the state Antara news agency said.
"There are dozens of villages with a total population of over 10,000 in the two subdistricts [to where they were traveling] whose fate remains unknown as there is no longer any land access to those areas," Sinjai district spokesman Budiman was quoted as saying.
"The roads have been buried by landslides," he said.
Teams of soldiers, police and search and rescue workers, assisted by villagers and volunteers, used excavators to reopen roads blocked by landslides around Sinjai, ElShinta radio reported.
The weather, cloudy in the morning, had cleared over Sinjai by noon. But Harsono said big seas were hindering his workers.
Sinjai lies about 1,600km northeast of the Indonesian capital Jakarta.
Flash floods and landslides in Indonesia are not unusual. Environmentalists say repeated disasters have occurred largely because of unchecked deforestation.
In January more than 150 Indonesians lost their lives in two separate landslides on Java.
Meanwhile, rescue vessels picked up 73 people from a ship that sank off Sumatra Island yesterday, but were still searching for at least 43 people still missing, a navy spokesman said.
The accident occurred around 40km off the port of Sibolga on western Sumatra, said Lieutenant Colonel Jaka Sentosa.
"The information we have received is that the boat sprang a leak and that the weather was very bad," he said.
He said two navy vessels dispatched to the scene and a passing freighter picked up 73 survivors, but that 43 others were still unaccounted for.
He said at least three foreigners were believed to be on the boat, which left late on Wednesday for the island of Nias, a popular spot for foreign surfers. It was unclear whether they had been rescued.
The first group of survivors arrived at Sibolga port and were taken straight to a hospital.
Hundreds of worried people waiting for news of relatives flocked to the boats and hugged their loved ones.
Accidents at sea are common in Indonesia, a vast archipelago where boat travel is the only way to reach many islands. Safety measures are poorly enforced, and many crafts lack sufficient life jackets and other safety equipment.
TIT-FOR-TAT: The arrest of Filipinos that Manila said were in China as part of a scholarship program follows the Philippines’ detention of at least a dozen Chinese The Philippines yesterday expressed alarm over the arrest of three Filipinos in China on suspicion of espionage, saying they were ordinary citizens and the arrests could be retaliation for Manila’s crackdown against alleged Chinese spies. Chinese authorities arrested the Filipinos and accused them of working for the Philippine National Security Council to gather classified information on its military, the state-run China Daily reported earlier this week, citing state security officials. It said the three had confessed to the crime. The National Security Council disputed Beijing’s accusations, saying the three were former recipients of a government scholarship program created under an agreement between the
Sitting around a wrestling ring, churchgoers roared as local hero Billy O’Keeffe body-slammed a fighter named Disciple. Beneath stained-glass windows, they whooped and cheered as burly, tattooed wresters tumbled into the aisle during a six-man tag-team battle. This is Wrestling Church, which brings blood, sweat and tears — mostly sweat — to St Peter’s Anglican church in the northern England town of Shipley. It is the creation of Gareth Thompson, a charismatic 37-year-old who said he was saved by pro wrestling and Jesus — and wants others to have the same experience. The outsized characters and scripted morality battles of pro wrestling fit
ACCESS DISPUTE: The blast struck a house, and set cars and tractors alight, with the fires wrecking several other structures and cutting electricity An explosion killed at least five people, including a pregnant woman and a one-year-old, during a standoff between rival groups of gold miners early on Thursday in northwestern Bolivia, police said, a rare instance of a territorial dispute between the nation’s mining cooperatives turning fatal. The blast thundered through the Yani mining camp as two rival mining groups disputed access to the gold mine near the mountain town of Sorata, about 150km northwest of the country’s administrative capital of La Paz, said Colonel Gunther Agudo, a local police officer. Several gold deposits straddle the remote area. Agudo had initially reported six people killed,
SUSPICION: Junta leader Min Aung Hlaing returned to protests after attending a summit at which he promised to hold ‘free and fair’ elections, which critics derided as a sham The death toll from a major earthquake in Myanmar has risen to more than 3,300, state media said yesterday, as the UN aid chief made a renewed call for the world to help the disaster-struck nation. The quake on Friday last week flattened buildings and destroyed infrastructure across the country, resulting in 3,354 deaths and 4,508 people injured, with 220 others missing, new figures published by state media showed. More than one week after the disaster, many people in the country are still without shelter, either forced to sleep outdoors because their homes were destroyed or wary of further collapses. A UN estimate
RSS