Asia floods: Death toll tops 1,500 as damaged roads and debris slow relief operations
Indonesia and Sri Lanka remain in crisis with nearly 900 people still missing, as rescuers struggle to reach cut-off communities and survivors describe going days without clean water, food, or aid.
Emergency crews across Asia raced to deliver life-saving assistance on Friday, a week after catastrophic floods and landslides killed more than 1,500 people and wiped out entire communities from Indonesia to Sri Lanka.
Authorities have confirmed 867 deaths in Indonesia, 486 in Sri Lanka, 185 in Thailand, and three in Malaysia.
Many villages in Indonesia and Sri Lanka remained buried under mud and debris, with nearly 900 people still unaccounted for in both countries, while recovery was further along in Thailand and Malaysia.
As floodwaters slowly recede, survivors across the worst-hit areas are emerging into landscapes of wreckage. Roads are severed, cutting off entire districts, leaving them only accessible by helicopter. Landslides tore down transmission towers, plunging towns into darkness and silencing communications for days.
Villages submerged under mud
In Aceh Tamiang, the hardest-hit district of Aceh province, entire villages lie submerged under a thick layer of mud. More than 260,000 people have fled, leaving behind homes swallowed by landslides, with farmland washed away.
Helicopters are now dropping food, medicine and blankets into isolated pockets, where clean water, sanitation and shelter are urgently needed.
Trucks loaded with supplies are inching along recently reopened roads from Medan, but debris and damage continue to slow down delivery, said National Disaster Management Agency spokesperson Abdul Muhari.
Television footage from Aceh Tamiang shows cars overturned, houses crushed, and animal carcasses strewn among debris.
Two hospitals and 15 community health clinics remain non-operational. Medical teams are improvising in crowded shelters, facing shortages of medicine and staff as waterborne illnesses loom.
People shelter under makeshift tarpaulins
On a battered bridge over the swollen Tamiang River, families shelter beneath makeshift tarpaulins.
Children shiver in damp clothes. One survivor, Vira, broke down as she described days without food or clean water.
“We have nothing left,” she said. “We drank floodwater from discarded bottles and scavenged for scraps — whatever the current carried to us.”
Another resident, Angga, said he and 13 others clung to a shattered tin roof for four nights. “Even now, eight days after the floods erased our village, no aid has reached us — no helicopters, no rescue teams,” he said. “We had no choice but to drink the very water that destroyed our homes.”
With thousands still missing and whole communities unreachable, officials warn the death toll could rise sharply in the days ahead.