An Indonesian woman works to clean up and pump water from her flooded home on Tuesday in a village in the Meureudu area of Pidie Jaya in Aceh province. Photo by Hotli Simanjuntak/EPA
The death toll from severe flooding and landslides in Indonesia rose to 702 on Tuesday with 1.1 million people evacuated from the worst hit northern and western regions of Sumatra, the archipelago’s largest island.
The Indonesia National Disaster Management Authority’s latest snapshot on its web portal showed that 499 people remained missing and 2,600 had been injured, with more than 3.3 million people impacted in total.
The agency said almost 10,000 houses had been damaged, more than 70% of them sustaining moderate to severe damage, as well as 323 educational institutions and 299 bridges.
The flooding from a cyclone that came ashore from the strait that separates northern Sumatra from Malaysia inundated large areas of the provinces of Aceh, North Sumatra and West Sumatra, leaving thousands cut off and running short of food and water.
Government public works teams were battling to clear the blocked route linking Medan City to Kuala Simpang in Aceh using heavy earth-moving equipment to remove soil, mud and other debris sealing off access to the area, BNPB wrote its social media account.
The agency said while it hoped to have the route fully open by Wednesday, it was deploying helicopters to airdrop supplies to remote areas of Aceh Tamiang, including Babo, Perupuk and District Bandar Pusaka, and via sea from Banda Aceh to Langsa on the northeastern coast.
Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto visited Aceh Province, North Sumatra and West Sumatra on Monday, traveling to Jorong Kasai, Nagari Kasang, Kecamatan Batang Anai and Padang Pariaman Regency to witness the destruction for himself and monitor the disaster response.
Prabowo said the government was undertaking a major push to get aid to people by air and restore power and water and assess the state of infrastructure. He pledged assistance for residents whose homes were damaged in flooding, flash floods and landslides.
Many residents in Aceh told the BBC that they were still waiting for aid with some saying they had been without food for two or three days and complaining of having to walk miles to access clean water and having no phone signal for the past five days.
Elon Musk instructed over the weekend that SpaceX’s Starlink satellite communications network be made available to affected residents in Sumatra free of charge.
Anger was mounting over the government’s handling of the disaster, which critics said was too slow due to lack of preparedness and excessive bureaucracy.
Environmental mismanagement, including deforestation for mining and agriculture, were also being blamed by acitivists for making the impact of the floods worse.
Cyclone Senyar, a rare such weather event so close to the equator, left some parts of North Sumatra under more than 9 feet of water after torrential rains from the system across much of the upper half of Sumatra.
The United Nations’ humanitarian affairs office warned that further “light to locally moderate” rainfall was expected in the 24-hour period through Tuesday across all the affected area.
A combination of weather events, including Senyar, together with the seasonal north-east monsoon in East and South Asia, is also being blamed for deadly storms and severe flooding in Thailand and Malaysia over the past five days and the Philippines and Vietnam earlier in November.
