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WORLD> Asia-Pacific
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Over 15,000 displaced in Indonesian floods
(Xinhua)
Updated: 2008-12-26 20:02 JAKARTA -- More than 15,000 people have escaped floods in Lampung province of Sumatra island in Indonesia, a local disaster management agency said here Friday.
Consecutive days of heavy rains have caused rivers overflow and submerged thousands of houses in South and East Lampung since Thursday, a local official of the agency who only gives his name as Ridwan said. He told Xinhua over phone from the province that "14,728 people have fled homes in South Lampung and 176 others in East Lampung." The official said that the evacuees had taken shelters in their relatives houses and other buildings at the higher ground. The waters also inundated hundreds hectares of shrimp ponds and rice fields and were predicted to cause hundreds millions of financial loss, he said. The floods also paralyzed transportation as the water submerged roads, said Ridwan. Aids for the floods victims have so far been sufficiently supplied by the local administration, he said. Indonesia has been frequently hit by floods due to lack of forest covered areas caused by deforestation and forest destruction. Illegal logging and opening of illegal plantation have been blamed for the forest loss in Indonesia, the world's third largest rain-forest country, which has 120,000 hectares of rain forest. The government is struggling to cope with the problem by re-planting over 100 million trees and strictly implementing law enforcement. |
