Woman rescued from landslide after 13 hours
JAKARTA: Rescuers in Indonesia pulled a woman alive from a car trapped by a landslide for 13 hours as torrential rains caused havoc in parts of the capital and neighbouring West Java, killing at least five people.
Television stations broadcast the frantic rescue effort near Jakarta’s international airport throughout the night.
Rescuers in orange uniforms finally pulled the trapped woman from her car at about 7am yesterday.
Another woman rescued several hours earlier from the same car died in hospital, an executive of the company she worked for told local TV.
Muhammad Syauqi, the head of the National Search and Rescue Agency, said the landslide caused the wall of an underpass to collapse, trapping the car and injuring the women.
Both women worked for GMF Aeroasia, a subsidiary of national airline Garuda Indonesia.
Seasonal downpours cause dozens of landslides and flash floods each year in Indonesia, an archipelago of more than 17,000 islands where millions of people live in mountainous areas or on flood plains.
Rescuers yesterday said three bodies were recovered from a village near Bogor in West Java including a one-year-old child. Two children aged eight and 10 were still missing.
On Monday, rescuers retrieved a body from villages ravaged by landslides in the hilly West Java resort town of Puncak and were searching for eight others.
The landslides blocked the main road connecting the area to Jakarta, where the National Disaster Mitigation Agency said floods have forced about 6,500 people to leave their homes.
The capital, with more than 30 million people in its greater metropolitan area, raised its flood alert to the highest level on Monday. — AP