Tuesday, March 13, 2012

Rescuers pull victims from Indonesian landslides

Rescuers pulled out corpses from villages devastated by landslides on Indonesia's Java island as authorities struggled Thursday to get heavy lifting equipment to the affected areas.

Officials said 36 corpses had been recovered and that 42 other people were buried and feared dead.

Most of the victims were killed in a single landslide Wednesday in the Karanganyar district in central Java that buried a group of residents dining together after cleaning up from an early, smaller landslide.

"I am searching for my cousin and my sister who are still buried beneath the mud," said Wiryo Hamidi as he dug barehanded through the remains of his village. "I hope we can find them today so I can bury them."

Hillsides collapsed onto houses and claimed victims in at least seven other places in the mountainous region, which had been lashed by hours of torrential rain.

Villages, police and soldiers working mostly with bare hands or simple agricultural tools uncovered two more corpses in Karanganyar on Thursday morning, one of them a young child, said Heru Aji Pratomo, the head of the local disaster coordinating agency.

"Everyone is working hard, we have good spirits," he told el-Shinta radio station.

He said 36 corpses had been recovered so far in Karanganyar, with at least 30 other people buried and feared dead.

Other officials have given slightly different tolls for the number of dead and buried.

A dozen other people were killed, or were missing and feared dead, elsewhere in the region, officials said.

Pratomo said rescuers were using high-powered hoses to wash away at the mud, but blocked roads and the remote location of the landslide meant that mechanical diggers and backhoes had yet to arrive.

Seasonal rains and high tides in recent days have caused widespread flooding across much of Indonesia, the world's fourth most-populous nation. Millions of people live in mountainous regions and near fertile flood plains that are close to rivers.

The latest disasters occurred on the third anniversary of a massive earthquake off Sumatra in December 2004 that triggered a tsunami. That killed more than 230,000 people and left a half-million homeless in a dozen countries.

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