Deadly Floods in Indonesia Leave Hundreds Missing

Hundreds of people have been killed and millions displaced as extreme weather has ravaged Southeast Asia this month. Indonesia’s heavy rain was linked to two tropical cyclones.

The authorities in Indonesia were searching on Sunday for hundreds of people they said were missing after days of unusually heavy rains across Southeast Asia that have killed hundreds and displaced millions.

The rescue efforts were underway on the island of Sumatra, where heavy rains pounded villages, blocked roads and damaged bridges, according to Indonesia’s National Disaster Management Agency. Nearly 300,000 people had been evacuated as of Saturday, the agency’s website said, and more rain was in the forecast.

Rescuers were digging through rubble with excavators and delivering aid by helicopters to inaccessible areas. Footage from Reuters showed survivors being airlifted out of murky floodwaters on Sumatra as wind whipped through treetops.

Indonesia is one of several Southeast Asian countries affected over the past few weeks by some of the region’s heaviest rainfall in years. The official death toll has surpassed 400 in Indonesia, 160 in Thailand and 90 in Vietnam. Malaysia has reported three deaths and extensive damage.

Recent flooding in southern Thailand displaced more than two million and left some people trapped on their roofs, clinging to electrical wires to stay afloat. That prompted the Thai military to deploy troops and other resources, including an aircraft carrier with helicopters, medical personnel and field kitchens.

Heavy rain is common across Southeast Asia around this time of year, but experts say the recent extreme weather has been exacerbated partly by La Niña, a weather phenomenon in which strong winds push warm water across the Pacific toward East Asia and create conditions for storms to form.

Elsewhere in Asia, 334 people have been killed by flooding in Sri Lanka, and emergency workers have been conducting rescues of stranded people for days, the country’s disaster management service reported.

The recent heavy rain in Indonesia was also linked to two tropical cyclones moving through the region. The storms pulled large amounts of warm, moist air toward the islands, helping to fuel more intense downpours than usual.

Tracking Tropical Storm Koto

See the likely path and wind arrival times for Koto

One of them, Tropical Storm Koto, was traveling across the South China Sea toward Vietnam on Sunday with maximum sustained winds of 58 miles per hour, according to the U.S. Navy’s Joint Typhoon Warning Center.

Such storms are very rare in the region. Indonesia’s location near the Equator makes it less conducive to the formation or passage of tropical cyclones, according to Andri Ramdhani, the director of Public Meteorology at the Meteorology, Climatology, and Geophysics Agency in Jakarta. This is because areas very close to the Equator lack the spin, or Coriolis force, that storms need to develop.

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