A small aircraft was damaged at Jayapura airport in the flooding (AFP Photo/Handout) |
At least 50 people have been killed by flash floods in Indonesia's eastern Papua province, an official said Sunday, as rescuers raced to find more victims of the disaster.
The floods
in Sentani, near the provincial capital of Jayapura, were triggered by
torrential rain and subsequent landslides on Saturday, and also left 59 people
injured.
Dozens of
homes were damaged by floodwaters, national disaster agency spokesman Sutopo
Purwo Nugroho said.
"The
number of casualties and impact of the disaster will likely increase as search
and rescue teams are still trying to reach other affected areas," he
added.
"The
floods were likely caused by a landslide."
The waters
had receded but officials were still trying to evacuate people.
"The
joint search and rescue teams are still doing evacuations and not all affected
areas have been reached because of fallen trees, rocks, mud and other
material," Nugroho said.
Video
footage from the scene showed rescuers administering oxygen to a victim who
appeared trapped beneath a fallen tree.
Uprooted
trees and other debris were strewn across muddy roads, while at Jayapura's
small airport a propeller plane lay partly crushed on a runway.
Papua
shares a border with independent Papua New Guinea on an island just north of
Australia.
Flooding is
not uncommon in Indonesia, especially during the rainy season which runs from
October to April.
In January,
floods and landslides killed at least 70 people on Sulawesi island, while
earlier this month hundreds in West Java province were forced to evacuate when
torrential rains triggered severe flooding.
The
Southeast Asian archipelago of some 17,000 islands is one of the most
disaster-prone nations on Earth, straddling the Pacific Ring of Fire, where
tectonic plates collide.
Earthquakes
and volcanic eruptions are common.
In
December, the western part of Java island was slammed by a deadly volcano-triggered
tsunami that killed about 400 people.
Also last
year, the city of Palu in Sulawesi was rocked by a quake-tsunami disaster that
killed thousands, while hundreds of others died in a series of quakes that hit
the holiday island of Lombok, next to Bali.
Flash floods in Indonesia's eastern Papua province have killed at least 77 people pic.twitter.com/e0Wtls7R7X— AFP news agency (@AFP) 18 maart 2019
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