Landslides strike Indonesia’s Sulawesi Island, 18 people were killed

• Search and rescue teams found 14 bodies in Makale village and four in South Makale.
• Fog and drizzle made the search difficult, with officers overwhelmed.
• Rescuers successfully extracted two injured individuals, including an 8-year-old girl.

Officials said Monday that a search and rescue team discovered 18 people killed by landslides on Indonesia’s Sulawesi Island and are still searching for two missing individuals. Mexianus Bekabel, the chief of Makassar Search and Rescue, reported that rescuers found about 14 bodies in Makale village on Sunday afternoon and four in South Makale.

“We are still looking for two more victims, but fog and drizzle made the search difficult and officers in the field were overwhelmed,” Sulaiman Malia, chief of the Tana Toraja District Disaster Management Agency, said on Monday.

Local police chief Gunardi Mundu stated that mud poured from surrounding hills onto four houses just before midnight on Saturday in the Tana Toraja district of South Sulawesi province. He mentioned that a family gathering was taking place in one of the houses when the landslide struck.

Mundu said that dozens of soldiers, police, and volunteers participated in the search in the remote hillside villages of Makale and South Makale. Early Sunday, rescuers successfully extracted two injured individuals, including an 8-year-old girl, and promptly transported them to a nearby hospital.

Muhari said that downed communications lines, bad weather, and unstable soil were hindering the rescue efforts.

Tana Toraja boasts many popular tourist attractions, including traditional houses and wooden statues of bodies buried in caves, known as tau-tau.

Seasonal downpours frequently trigger landslides and floods in Indonesia, a chain of 17,000 islands where millions of people reside in mountainous regions or fertile flood plains.

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