By
The Associated Press
JAKARTA, Indonesia - Monsoon rains inundated the island of Sumatra yesterday, triggering dozens of landslides and sweeping victims down raging rivers. The flooding has so far killed more than 100 people.
With dozens unaccounted for, rescuers feared the death toll would rise on the Indonesian island.
"We are looking for survivors, but we fear there will only be corpses," student volunteer Nanang Farid Syam said in the West Sumatran capital of Padang.
Relief workers said blocked and flooded roads and continuing rains were hampering rescue efforts.
"There are reports of landslides everywhere," said Jual Effendi, head of the province's rescue service. He said at least 90 people were feared dead in the region.
Effendi said some food aid had reached the worst-affected areas in the provinces of West Sumatra and Aceh on the northern half of the island, about 625 miles northwest of the nation's capital, Jakarta.
Landslides in Indonesia are frequently caused by monsoon rain in areas where land has been weakened by deforestation. Last month, floods and landslides killed over one hundred people in the country's main island of Java.
The Jakarta Post daily described the Sumatra flooding as the worst since 1953.
Power and telephone lines in Aceh's capital, Banda Aceh, have been swept away, leaving thousands off people in the town without electricity, the Kompas newspaper reported.
The province of 4.1 million people has been the scene of a bitter war between government troops and separatists who want to set up an independent nation on the northern tip of Sumatra island.
To the south, large parts of Padang were under as much as nine feet of water, witnesses said. Eight counties were partially inundated, and hundreds of acres of rice paddies had been destroyed.
Many of the victims were carried away by raging waters or buried under mud and rock when sodden hillsides collapsed, said Endar, an official of Indonesia's national search and rescue agency.
Endar, who like many Indonesians uses only one name, said 53 bodies had been found in other parts of Sumatra and that 71 people were still missing.
