TANAH DATAR, Indonesia — Rescuers on Tuesday searched rivers and the rubble of devastated villages for bodies and, wherever possible, survivors of the flash floods that hit the Indonesian island of Sumatra over the weekend.
Monsoon rains and a landslide of mud and cold lava from Mount Marapi caused rivers to overflow. The deluge devastated mountain villages in four districts of West Sumatra province shortly before midnight on Saturday.
The floods swept away people and 79 homes and submerged hundreds of houses and buildings, forcing more than 3,300 residents to flee to temporary government shelters, National Disaster Management Agency spokesman Abdul Muhari said.
Muhari said 50 bodies had been pulled from the mud and rivers as of Tuesday, mostly in the worst-affected districts of Agam and Tanah Datar, while rescuers were searching for 27 people reported missing.
Television reports showed rescue personnel using jackhammers, circular saws, farm tools and sometimes their bare hands, desperately digging in Agam district, where roads transformed into murky, brown rivers and villages covered in thick mud, rocks and uprooted trees.
Dozens of rescue personnel searched through a river around the Anai Valley waterfall area in Tanah Datar district, where tons of mud, rocks and trees were left behind due to flash flooding.
Rescuers focused on finding four people from a group of seven who were swept away by their cars. Three more bodies were removed on Monday, said Abdul Malik, director of the Search and Rescue Office in Padang, the provincial capital.
“With many missing and some remote areas still inaccessible, the death toll is likely to rise,” Malik said.
Heavy rains cause frequent landslides and flash floods in Indonesia, an archipelago nation of more than 17,000 islands where millions of people live in mountainous areas or near floodplains.
The weekend disaster came just two months after heavy rain caused flash floods and a landslide in western Sumatra, killing at least 26 people and leaving 11 others missing.
A surprise eruption of Mount Marapi late last year killed 23 climbers. The mountain’s sudden eruptions are difficult to predict because the source is shallow and close to the summit, according to Indonesia’s Center for Volcanology and Geological Disaster Mitigation.
Marapi has been active since an eruption in January 2024 that caused no casualties. It is among the more than 120 active volcanoes in Indonesia. The country is prone to seismic upheavals due to its location on the Pacific “Ring of Fire,” an arc of volcanoes and fault lines that surround the Pacific basin.
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Associated Press writer Niniek Karmini in Jakarta, Indonesia, contributed to this report.
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