Indonesia searches sea for landslide, flood victims

SINJAI, Indonesia, June 23 (Reuters) Indonesian search and rescue operations turned to the sea today in the search for missing victims after landslides and floods on eastern Sulawesi island killed 201 people, officials said.

A senior Red Cross official said some people might have been swept away after two days of torrential rain in South Sulawesi province at the beginning of the week flattened homes and turned vast swathes of land into lakes.

More than 300 people are still missing in the area where rescuers have been scouring mud-filled homes and digging into mud from landslides or left behind by the floods in their search for survivors, a disaster task force official said.

The Red Cross official had earlier pegged the death toll at 215 and the number of missing at 62. Estimates in Indonesia vary frequently due to poor communications with remote areas, which makes it difficult to pin down the exact numbers.

''The search is directed to the sea because the ... people who are missing are suspected to have been swept into the ocean,'' Rahman Bando, South Sulawesi branch head of the Indonesian Red Cross, told Reuters by phone from Makassar, the provincial capital.

Makassar is about 1,400 km east of Jakarta.

Worst-hit Sinjai regency accounted for 185 deaths while the rest of the deaths occurred in other regencies in the province where rescue efforts have been hampered by the inaccessibility of some areas because roads and bridges have been damaged.

''Food aid is still inadequate. The other problem is food distribution because many places are mountainous and in remote areas. Maybe today we will drop food by army helicopters,'' Moersen Buana, a disaster task force official in Makassar.

Clean drinking water was another problem as some wells were mixed with flood waters and mud.

Many villages on river banks in the area have been damaged with traditional wooden houses flattened and concrete buildings covered with mud.

Aid workers have set up public kitchens and the central government has sent medicines, blankets and sarongs and instructed local officials to help people move to safer areas.

Sulawesi is resource-rich, with numerous mining operations, but they have not been hit because they are are far from the affected areas.

Tropical downpours and resulting floods and landslides are relatively common in Indonesia.

Rampant deforestation often adds to the ease with which hillsides are saturated and collapse as well as to flooding, since the lack of vegetation means less ground water is retained, environmentalists say.

REUTERS SY PM1350