A landslide left at least nineteen dead and two missing in central Indonesia following heavy rainfall, the country's emergency services announced on Sunday April 14. The bodies of the dead and two survivors were removed from the area that was hit Saturday evening, from villages in the Tana Toraja region of South Sulawesi province, said Sulaiman Malia, head of the local agency. of disaster management, at Agence France-Presse (AFP).
“There are nineteen dead: four in Makale South and fifteen others in the villages around Makale,” he said, before adding that the search for other victims was still underway – two people were still missing, probably buried.
Tana Toraja and its surrounding areas have been “affected by heavy rains, especially over the past week, with virtually no interruption,” Sulaiman Malia also said. Heavy rainfall eroded the soil in residential areas on the mountainside, causing landslides that buried homes, he said.
Indonesia experiences numerous landslides during the rainy season and the phenomenon has been worsened in some places by deforestation. In early March, flash floods and landslides on the island of Sumatra killed at least thirty people and dozens more are still missing.
