CIRENDEU -- Torrential rain caused an old dam to burst its banks early Friday, sending a wall of muddy water crashing into a suburb of the Indonesian capital. The flood killed at least 50 people, left scores missing and submerged hundreds of homes.
Residents are evacuated from the flood-hit area in the outskirts of Jakarta, Indonesia, March 27, 2009. [Xinhua]
Water levels were so high in some places that people waited with their pets on rooftops for rescuers. Telephone lines were toppled and cars swept away, some ending up in parks hundreds of feet (meters) from where they'd been parked.
The earthen dam, built in the early 1900s, when Indonesia was still under Dutch colonial rule, surrounded a man-made lake in Cirendeu, on the southwestern edge of Jakarta. It collapsed just after 2 a.m., when most people were sleeping, sending 70 million cubic feet (2 million cubic meters) of water cascading into homes.
They predicted the death toll would rise.
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