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Hundreds dead and missing as massive flooding spreads
30th November, 2025 08:17 AM
Torrential rains have triggered floods and landslides across South East Asia, leaving hundreds dead and missing.
Monsoon rain exacerbated by tropical storms caused some of the region’s worst flooding in years, with millions affected in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand.
Intense rainfall began on the Indonesian island of Sumatra on Wednesday. “During the flood, everything was gone,” a resident of Bireuen in Sumatra’s Aceh province told Reuters news agency. “I wanted to save my clothes, but my house came down.”
With hundreds still missing, the death toll is likely to rise. Thousands remain stranded, some awaiting rescue on rooftops.
As of Saturday, November 29, 2025, more than 300 people had died in Indonesia and 160 in Thailand. There were also several deaths reported in Malaysia.
An exceptionally rare tropical cyclone, named Cyclone Senyar, caused catastrophic landslides and flooding in Indonesia, with homes swept away and thousands of buildings submerged.
Indonesia’s disaster agency said that nearly 300 people were still missing after flooding devastated Sumatra.
“The current was very fast, in a matter of seconds it reached the streets, entered the houses,” a resident in Aceh Province, Arini Amalia, told the BBC.
She and her grandmother raced to a relative’s house on higher terrain. On returning the following day to retrieve some belongings, she said the flood had completely swallowed the house: “It’s already sunk.”
After the waters rapidly rose in West Sumatra and submerged his home, Meri Osman said he was “swept away by the current” and clung to a clothesline until he was rescued.
The bad weather has hampered rescue operations, and while tens of thousands of people have been evacuated, hundreds are still stranded, the Indonesian disaster agency said.
In Thailand’s southern Songkhla province, water rose 3m (10ft), and at least 145 people died in one of the worst floods in a decade.
Across the 10 provinces hit by flooding, more than 160 people have been killed, the government said. More than 3.8 million people have been affected.
The city of Hat Yai experienced 335mm of rainfall in a single day, the heaviest in 300 years. As waters receded, officials recorded a sharp rise in the death toll.
At one hospital in Hat Yai, employees were forced to move bodies to refrigerated trucks after the morgue became overwhelmed, news agency AFP reported.
“We were stuck in the water for seven days, and no agency came to help,” Hat Yai resident Thanita Khiawhom told BBC Thai.
The government has promised relief measures, including compensation of up to Ksh9.5 million for households that lost family members.
In neighbouring Malaysia, the death toll is far lower, but the damage is just as devastating.
Flooding has wreaked havoc and left parts of northern Perlis state underwater, with two people dead and tens of thousands forced into shelters.
Elsewhere in Asia, Sri Lanka has been battered by Cyclone Ditwah, with more than 130 people dead and some 170 missing, officials said.
Sri Lanka is also grappling with one of its worst weather disasters in recent years, and the government has declared a state of emergency.
More than 15,000 homes have been destroyed and some 78,000 people forced into temporary shelters, officials said. They added that about a third of the country was without electricity or running water.
