Landslides hit Indonesia’s Sulawesi island, kill 18

TANA TORAJA, Indonesia: A searchand-rescue team found 18 people killed by landslides on Indonesia’s Sulawesi island and are still looking for two missing, officials said on Monday.

Rescuers found about 14 bodies in Makale village on Sunday afternoon and four in South Makale village, said Mexianus Bekabel, the chief of Makassar Search and Rescue.

“We are still looking for two more victims, but fog and drizzle made the search difficult, and officers in the field were overwhelmed,” Sulaiman Malia, chief of the Tana Toraja district Disaster Management Agency, said on Monday.

Loosened by torrential rain, mud poured from surrounding hills onto four houses just before midnight on Saturday in the Tana Toraja district of South Sulawesi province, said local police chief Gunardi Mundu. A family gathering was being held in one of the houses when the landslide happened, he added.

Dozens of soldiers, police and volunteers joined the search in the two remote hillside villages, Mundu said. Rescuers on Sunday morning managed to pull out two injured people, including an 8-year-old girl, and rushed them to a nearby hospital.

Downed communications lines, bad weather and unstable soil were hampering the rescue efforts, Muhari said.

Tana Toraja has many popular tourist attractions, including traditional houses and wooden statues of bodies buried in caves, known as “tau-tau.”

Indonesia is prone to landslides during the rainy season, and the problem has been aggravated in some places by deforestation, with prolonged torrential rain causing flooding in some areas of the Southeast Asian archipelago nation.

Last month, flash floods and landslides on Sumatra island killed at least 30 people, with scores still missing.

A landslide and flooding swept away dozens of houses and destroyed a hotel near Lake Toba on Sumatra in December, killing at least two people.