Flooding in South East Asia leaves 600 dead

Heavy rains triggered floods and landslides in parts of south Asia, killing nearly 600 people.

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

Heavy rains began on the Indonesian island of Sumatra on Wednesday. “Everything was lost during the flood,” a resident of Bireuen in Sumatra’s Aceh province told Reuters news agency. “I wanted to save my clothes, but my house was destroyed.”

The death toll is likely to rise as hundreds of people are still missing. Thousands of people are trapped, some are waiting to be rescued on the rooftops.

As of Saturday, more than 300 people died in Indonesia and more than 160 people in Thailand. Many deaths were also reported in Malaysia.

More than 130 people died and about 170 people were missing in Sri Lanka, hit by Cyclone Ditwah, officials said.

An extremely rare tropical cyclone called Hurricane Senyar caused catastrophic landslides and flooding in Indonesia, sweeping away homes and submerging thousands of buildings.

Nearly 300 people are still missing after floods devastated Sumatra, Indonesia’s disaster agency said on Saturday.

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

He and his grandmother ran toward a relative’s house on the upland. When he returned the next day to collect some belongings, he said the flood had completely engulfed the house: “It had already sunk.”

After waters rose rapidly in West Sumatra, submerging her home, Meri Osman said she was “caught up in the current” and held on to a clothesline until she was rescued.

Indonesia’s disaster agency said bad weather had hampered rescue operations and although tens of thousands of people had been evacuated, hundreds were still trapped.

In Thailand’s southern Songkhla province, waters rose 3 meters and at least 145 people died in the worst floods of the last decade.

More than 160 people died in 10 flood-affected provinces, the government said on Saturday. More than 3.8 million people were affected.

Hat Yai city received 335 mm of rainfall in a single day; This was the heaviest rainfall in the last 300 years. As the waters receded, authorities recorded a sharp increase in the death toll.

At a hospital in Hat Yai, workers had to move bodies into refrigerated trucks after the morgue was overflowing, AFP news agency reported.

“We were stranded 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 have lost family members.

In neighboring Malaysia, the death toll is much lower, but the damage is just as devastating.

The flood caused major damage and submerged parts of northern Perlis province; Two people died and tens of thousands of people had to take shelter in shelters.

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

More than 15,000 homes were destroyed and about 78,000 people were forced into temporary shelters, authorities said. They added that nearly a third of the country lacks electricity or running water.

Extreme weather conditions in Southeast Asia may be caused by the interaction of Typhoon Koto in the Philippines and rare Cyclone Senyar in the Strait of Malacca, meteorologists said.

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

Climate change has changed storm patterns, including the intensity and duration of the season, causing more precipitation, flash floods and stronger winds.