Flooding in South East Asia leaves 600 dead

Torrential rains have triggered floods and landslides across parts of southern Asia, killing about 600 people.

Monsoon rain exacerbated by tropical storms caused some of the region’s worst flooding in years, with millions affected in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Sri Lanka.

Intense rainfall began on the Indonesian island of Sumatra on Wednesday. “During the flood, everything was gone,” a resident of Bireuen in Sumatra’s Aceh province told Reuters news agency. “I wanted to save my clothes, but my house came down.”

With hundreds still missing, the death toll is likely to rise. Thousands remain stranded, some awaiting rescue on rooftops.

As of Saturday more than 300 people had died in Indonesia and 160 in Thailand. There were also several deaths reported in Malaysia.

In Sri Lanka, which has been battered by Cyclone Ditwah, more than 130 people are dead and some 170 missing, officials said.

An exceptionally rare tropical cyclone, named Cyclone Senyar, caused catastrophic landslides and flooding in Indonesia, with homes swept away and thousands of buildings submerged.

Indonesia’s disaster agency said on Saturday that nearly 300 people were still missing after flooding devastated Sumatra.

“The current was very fast, in a matter of seconds it reached the streets, entered the houses,” a resident in Aceh Province, Arini Amalia, told the BBC.

She and her grandmother raced to a relative’s house on higher terrain. On returning the following day to retrieve some belongings, she said the flood had completely swallowed the house: “It’s already sunk.”

After waters rapidly rose in West Sumatra and submerged his home, Meri Osman said he was “swept away by the current” and clung onto a clothesline until he was rescued.

The bad weather has hampered rescue operations, and while tens of thousands of people have been evacuated, hundreds are still stranded, the Indonesian disaster agency said.

In Thailand’s southern Songkhla province, water rose 3m (10ft) and at least 145 people died in one of the worst floods in a decade.

Across the 10 provinces hit by flooding, more than 160 people have been killed, the government said on Saturday. More than 3.8 million people have been affected.

The city of Hat Yai experienced 335mm of rainfall in a single day, the heaviest in 300 years. As waters receded, officials recorded a sharp rise in the death toll.

At one hospital in Hat Yai, employees were forced to move bodies to refrigerated trucks after the morgue became overwhelmed, news agency AFP reported.

“We were stuck in the water for seven days and no agency came to help,” Hat Yai resident Thanita Khiawhom told BBC Thai.

The government has promised relief measures, including compensation of up to two million baht ($62,000) for households that lost family members.

In neighbouring Malaysia, the death toll is far lower, but the damage is just as devastating.

Flooding has wreaked havoc and left parts of northern Perlis state under water, with two people dead and tens of thousands forced into shelters.

Sri Lanka is also grappling with one of its worst weather disasters in recent years, and the government has declared a state of emergency.

More than 15,000 homes have been destroyed and some 78,000 people forced into temporary shelters, officials said. They added that about a third of the country was without electricity or running water.

Meteorologists have said the extreme weather in South East Asia may have been caused by the interaction of Typhoon Koto in the Philippines and the rare formation of Cyclone Senyar in the Malacca Strait.

The region’s annual monsoon season, typically between June and September, often brings heavy rain.

Climate change has altered storm patterns, including the intensity and duration of the season, resulting in heavier rainfall, flash flooding and stronger winds.