Floodwaters largely receded, but hundreds of thousands of people now living in shelters
\n sumatra
\nGovernments and aid groups in Indonesia and Sri Lanka worked to rush aid Tuesday to hundreds of thousands stranded by deadly flooding that has killed around 1,200 people in four countries.
\nTorrential monsoon season deluges paired with two separate tropical cyclones last week dumped heavy rain across all of Sri Lanka and parts of Indonesia\u2019s Sumatra, southern Thailand, and northern Malaysia.
\nClimate change is producing more intense rain events because a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, and warmer oceans can turbocharge storms.
\nThe floodwaters have now largely receded, but the devastation means hundreds of thousands of people are now living in shelters and struggling to secure clean water and food.
\nIn Indonesia\u2019s Aceh, one of the worst-affected regions, residents told AFP that survivors who could afford to were stockpiling supplies.
\n\u201cRoad access is mostly cut off in flood-affected areas,\u201d 29-year-old Erna Mardhiah said as she joined a long queue at a petrol station in Banda Aceh.
\n\u201cPeople are worried about running out of fuel,\u201d she added from the line she had been in for two hours.
\nThe pressure has caused skyrocketing prices.
\n\u201cMost things are already sky-high… chillies alone are up to 300,000 rupiah per kilo ($18), so that\u2019s probably why people are panic-buying,\u201d she said.
\nOn Monday, Indonesia\u2019s government said it was sending 34,000 tons of rice and 6.8 million litres of cooking oil to the three worst-affected provinces, Aceh, North Sumatra and West Sumatra.
\n\u201cThere can be no delays,\u201d Agriculture Minister Andi Amran Sulaiman said.
\nFood shortage risk
\nAid groups said they were working to ship supplies to affected areas, warning that local markets were running out of essential supplies and prices had tripled already.
\n\u201cCommunities across Aceh are at severe risk of food shortages and hunger if supply lines are not reestablished in the next seven days,\u201d charity group Islamic Relief said.
\nA shipment of 12 tonnes of food from the group aboard an Indonesian navy vessel was due to arrive in Aceh on Tuesday.
\nAt least 631 people were killed in the floods across Sumatra, and 472 are still listed as missing. A million people have evacuated from their homes, according to the disaster agency.
\nSurvivors have described terrifying waves of water that arrived without warning.
\nIn East Aceh, Zamzami said the floodwaters had been \u201cunstoppable, like a tsunami wave.\u201d
\n\u201cWe can\u2019t explain how big the water seemed. It was truly extraordinary,\u201d said the 33-year-old, who, like many Indonesians, goes by one name.
\nPeople in his village sheltered atop a local two-storey fish market to escape the deluge and were now trying to clean the mud and debris left behind while battling power and telecommunications outages.
\n\u201cIt\u2019s difficult for us (to get) clean water,\u201d he told AFP on Monday.
\n\u201cThere are children who are starting to get fevers, and there\u2019s no medicine.\u201d
\nThe weather system that inundated Indonesia also brought heavy rain to southern Thailand, where at least 176 people were killed.
\nAcross the border in Malaysia, two more people were killed.
\nColombo floodwaters recede
\nA separate storm brought heavy rains across all of Sri Lanka, triggering flash floods and deadly landslides that killed at least 390 people.
\nAnother 352 remain missing, and some of the worst-hit areas in the country\u2019s centre are still difficult to reach.
\nPresident Anura Kumara Dissanayake has declared a state of emergency to deal with what he called the \u201cmost challenging natural disaster in our history\u201d.
\nUnlike his Indonesian counterpart, he has called for international aid.
\nSri Lanka\u2019s air force, backed by counterparts from India and Pakistan, has been evacuating stranded residents and delivering food and other supplies.
\nIn the mountainous Welimada region, security forces on Monday recovered the bodies of 11 residents buried by mudslides, a local official said.
\nIn the capital Colombo meanwhile, floodwaters were slowly subsiding on Tuesday.
\nThe speed with which waters rose around the city surprised local residents used to seasonal flooding.
\n\u201cEvery year we experience minor floods, but this is something else,\u201d delivery driver Dinusha Sanjaya told AFP.
\n\u201cIt is not just the amount of water, but how quickly everything went under.\u201d
\nRains have eased across the country, but landslide alerts remain in force across most of the hardest-hit central region, officials said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Floodwaters largely receded, but hundreds of thousands of people now living in shelters sumatra Governments and aid groups in Indonesia and Sri Lanka worked to rush aid Tuesday to hundreds of thousands stranded by deadly flooding that has killed around 1,200 people in four countries. Torrential monsoon season deluges paired with two separate tropical cyclones […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":517871,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-517855","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-world"],"yoast_head":"\n