Over 90 dead in Indonesia, East Timor floods

LEMBATA, Indonesia: Tropical cyclone Seroja pounded Indonesia and East Timor Monday after torrential rains triggered floods and landslides that have killed at least 91 people and left dozens missing.

Packing heavy winds and rain, the storm heaped more misery on the Southeast Asian nations after Sunday’s disaster turned small communities into wastelands of mud and uprooted trees and forced thousands of people into shelters.

Downpours are expected over the next day as the storm triggers offshore waves as high as six metres (20 feet), Indonesia’s disaster agency said. The cyclone, which was picking up strength as it moved toward the west coast of Australia, hampered efforts to reach trapped survivors.

Indonesia’s disaster agency said at least 70 people have been killed, with another 70 missing. In East Timor, at least 21 people have been killed according to an official in the tiny half-island nation of 1.3 million that lies between Indonesia and Australia.

Many of the deaths were in East Timor’s inundated capital Dili, where the front of the presidential palace was transformed into a mud pit. In Indonesia’s remote East Flores municipality, torrents of mud washed over homes, bridges and roads.

Images from Indonesia’s search-and-rescue agency showed workers digging up mud-covered corpses before placing them in body bags. On Lembata, an island east of Flores, parts of some villages were swept down a mountainside and carried to the shore of the ocean.

Soon after flash floods began tearing into resident Basir Langoday’s district in the early morning, he heard screams for help from a nearby home covered in rubble. “There were four of them inside. Three survived but the other one didn’t make it,” he told reporters. Langoday and his friends scrambled to try and save the trapped man before he was crushed to death. “He said ‘hurry, I can’t hold on any longer,” Langoday added.

Indonesian President Joko Widodo expressed “deepest condolences” over the devastation in the southeast end of the archipelago. “I understand the deep sorrow suffered by our brothers and sisters because of this disaster,” he said in a nationwide address.

The European Union said it was ready to offer assistance to poverty-stricken East Timor, officially known as Timor-Leste. Some 2,500 people had been evacuated in East Timor, along with several thousand more in Indonesia. Pounding rains challenged efforts to find any survivors.