78 dead in Indonesia floods

BUKIT LAWANG, Indonesia -- A torrent of water, mud and logs swept through a resort village near a reserve for endangered orangutans on Indonesia's Sumatra island, killing at least 78 people, including five foreigners, and leaving about 100 people missing, officials said.\nRescuers searched for survivors Tuesday, but hopes of finding people alive beneath the debris faded.\nDays of heavy rain triggered a surge Sunday night in the Bahorok River, which winds through the village of Bukit Lawang. Dozens of inns and restaurants that line its banks were destroyed.\nMost of the village's 2,500 people were asleep when the flood hit. Many had been observing the dawn-to-dusk fast of the Ramadan holy month and had gone to bed early to rise for a pre-dawn meal.\nMuhammad Yusuf, a tourist guide, held a white T-shirt that belonged to his 3-year-old daughter, who drowned. "She used to wear this when she rode her bicycle," he said. "I've lost everything."\nOfficials blamed the flood on illegal logging in the jungles above the village, which lies 45 miles from the north Sumatran provincial capital of Medan.\nHuge branches and boulders lay tumbled across the once picturesque town, which has long drawn backpackers from across the world to its orangutan reserve.\nAmericans Tyson Murphy, 27, and Tommy Connelly, 26, said they climbed trees to escape the deluge, clinging to the branches for 1 1/2 hours.\nWhen the waters subsided, "we each kissed our respective trees and took a branch with us," said Connelly, of Ladera Ranch, Calif.\n"It's one of those things you think will never happen to you," said Murphy, of Laguna Beach, Calif. "I just said a couple of prayers.\nDespite the devastation, officials said the several dozen orangutans in the reserve, located a mile up the valley from the river, appeared unaffected by the disaster.\nAuthorities revised their casualty figures Tuesday. Police Sgt. Bomer Pasaribu said Tuesday that 78 people died, up from 71 given Monday, and said about 100 were missing, a decline from 108 a day earlier.\nThe new toll included three more bodies found Tuesday morning in the wreckage, and mourners at a local mosque washed bodies and said prayers for the dead.\nOfficials also provided different nationalities for most of the five foreign victims, saying two Germans, two Austrians and a Singaporean were killed. Earlier, they said a German, an Australian, two Chinese and a Singaporean died.\nA bulldozer shifted huge branches and boulders on the riverbank. Two large tourist buses remained overturned on their sides.\nA single corpse in a black plastic bag lay unclaimed outside the village mosque. The remaining bodies had either been buried immediately according to Islamic tradition or were taken to Medan.\nLate Monday, survivors wandered among the devastation. Others were sleeping on the floor of the mosque or at a government building on higher ground.\n"The logs and rocks hit my body and turned me black and blue. I survived when neighbors pulled me out of the river," said a sobbing survivor who identified himself only as Hendri.\n"I watched my father and mother drown," he said.\nHendri said the water surge lasted 10 minutes and carried thousands of logs, which smashed into inns near the river.\nHundreds of people die each year in floods in Indonesia, an archipelago with 210 million people. Environmentalists say many of the disasters are caused by illegal deforestation, which disrupts the natural absorption and flow of water from the highlands.\n"The flood shows us that the upper area of the Leuser National Park has already been seriously degraded due to illegal as well as semi-illegal logging," said local conservationist Michael Oni Setiawan, referring to the park that towers above the village.\nTourism had been the mainstay of the village since the orangutan reserve was established more than 20 years ago.\n"What are we going to do now?" said Lebeh Muktar, as he surveyed the remains of his village. "Everyone knows someone who was killed. Why us"