Rescuers hunt for dozens missing
Rescuers were searching for dozens of people still missing yesterday after floods and landslides swept away villages in Indonesia and East Timor, killing at least 120 people and leaving thousands more homeless.
Torrential rains from Tropical Cyclone Seroja, one of the most destructive storms to hit the region in years, turned small communities into wastelands of mud, uprooted trees and sent around 10,000 people fleeing to shelters across the neighbouring Southeast Asian nations.
Indonesia's disaster management agency said it had recorded 86 deaths in a cluster of remote islands. In East Timor another 34 have been officially listed as dead since the disaster struck on Sunday.
Authorities revised down an initial higher death toll for Indonesia, citing miscommunication with local agencies.
But search and rescue teams there were racing to find more than 100 people still missing and were using diggers to clear mountains of debris. The storm swept buildings in some villages down a mountainside and to the shore of the ocean on Lembata island, where several small communities have been wiped off the map.
Fatal landslides and flash floods are common across the Indonesian archipelago during the rainy season. The disaster agency has estimated that 125 million Indonesians -- nearly half of the country's population -- live in areas at risk of landslides.
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