Indonesian rescuers scoured mud-filled homes for bodies and some survivors suffered diarrhoea and skin diseases after landslides and floods on eastern Sulawesi island killed 210 people, officials said yesterday.

A search-and-rescue operation has been underway in South Sulawesi province after two days of heavy rain at the beginning of the week, but officials said some areas were inaccessible because roads and bridges had been damaged.

Another 71 people were still missing in Sinjai regency, the worst-hit area after floodings had turned swathes of land into vast lakes.

The Indonesian military, police and civilian search and rescue teams have been scouring the affected areas trying to recover bodies and digging into mud from landslides or left behind by the floods to look for survivors.

Rahman Bando, South Sulawesi branch head of the Indonesian Red Cross, said 180 people had died in Sinjai alone and 30 had died in other regencies in the province.

“We have provided public kitchens and our volunteers are looking for victims. Several areas are unreachable. Bridges and roads are broken. We walk in the rivers,” he told Reuters by phone from the provincial capital of Makassar. Makassar is about 1,400 km (870 miles) east of Jakarta. Torrential rains and landslides are regular features of tropical Indonesia.

“Water is receding. Search and rescue teams keep searching in homes filled with mud,” said Moersen Buana of the disaster task force in Makassar. “Sanitation is becoming a problem. People can’t use regular toilets because water systems are totally destroyed,” he added. Diarrhoea and skin diseases have begun appearing, Buana said.

<B>Woodened houses flattened </B>

Rescuers found dozens of people on the missing list alive and are searching for survivors and bodies near the coastline using rubber floats, witnesses said.

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

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.

Forestry Minister Malem Sambat Kaban told reporters that residents had cleared the hills around Sinjai for farmland.

“What happened in Sinjai is a warning for the rest of Indonesia if rain falls more than three hours,” he said, pointing out that the country had lost vast areas of forest to farmland and logging.

Sulawesi is resource-rich, with numerous mining operations, but those are far from the affected areas, a mines ministry official said on Wednesday. “The landslide is in the south where there is no mining operation. Mining operations in other areas have no problem,” M.S. Marpaung, director of mineral resources in the mines and energy ministry, told Reuters.

The central government has sent blankets, medicines and sarongs and instructed local officials to help people move to safer areas.

<B>Yusuf AHMAD</B>