Indonesia suffers food, medical shortages as Asia flood tolls rise

AFP | Jakarta

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Regions hit by floods that killed hundreds in Indonesia were suffering from food and medical shortages, authorities said, as elephants pitched in yesterday to help clear up debris.

Tropical storms and monsoon rains have pummelled Southeast and South Asia this month, triggering landslides and flash floods from the rainforests of Indonesia’s western Sumatra island to highland plantations in Sri Lanka.

“Everything is lacking, especially medical personnel. We are short on doctors,” Muzakir Manaf, the governor of Indonesia’s Aceh province, told reporters late Sunday.

Indonesia’s national disaster mitigation agency (BNPB) said 961 people in Aceh, North Sumatra and West Sumatra had been killed, while 293 were missing. More than a million people were displaced, the agency said.

Sri Lanka’s military meanwhile deployed thousands of extra troops to aid recovery efforts after a devastating cyclone caused a wave of destruction and killed 635 people.

In Pidie Jaya, a district in Indonesia’s Aceh badly affected by the floods, four elephants from a nearby training centre picked up large pieces of rubble with their trunks and helped shift stuck vehicles.

“We brought four elephants to clear the debris from the houses of the communities that were swept away by the flood,” Hadi Sofyan, the head of a local conservation agency, told AFP. “Our target is to clean the debris near the residents’ houses so they can access their homes,” he said, adding the elephants would be used for the rest of the week. The downpours and subsequent landslides throughout western Indonesia have injured at least 5,000 people and devastated infrastructure, including schools and hospitals.

In the city of Banda Aceh, long queues formed for drinking water and fuel, and prices of basic commodities such as eggs were skyrocketing, an AFP correspondent said. Costs to rebuild after the disaster could run up to 51.82 trillion rupiah ($3.1 billion), the BNPB said late Sunday.