Hundreds of people dead and missing in floods across Southeast Asia

Heavy rains have caused floods and landslides across Southeast Asia, leaving hundreds of people dead or missing.

Monsoon rains were exacerbated by a tropical cyclone that caused the region's worst flooding in years, affecting millions of people in Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand.

Heavy rain began to fall on the Indonesian island of Sumatra on Wednesday. “During the floods, everything was lost,” a resident of Bireuwen, Sumatra's Aceh province, told Reuters. “I wanted to save the clothes, but the house collapsed.”

Hundreds of people are still missing, and the death toll is likely to rise further. Thousands of people remain stranded, some on rooftops waiting for rescue.

As of Saturday, more than 300 people had died in Indonesia and 160 in Thailand. Several deaths were also reported in Malaysia.

An extremely rare tropical cyclone called Cyclone Senyar has caused devastating landslides and flooding in Indonesia, washing away homes and leaving thousands of buildings submerged.

Indonesia's disaster authorities said on Saturday that nearly 300 people were still missing after flooding hit the island of Sumatra.

“The flow was very fast. Within seconds it reached the road and entered the house,” Alini Amalia, a resident of Aceh province, told the BBC.

She and her grandmother hurried to a relative's house on higher ground. When she returned the next day to retrieve her belongings, she said the floodwaters had completely engulfed her house. “It's already submerged,” she said.

Meri Osman said she was “swept by the current” and clung to a clothesline until she was rescued after rapidly rising water levels submerged her home in West Sumatra province.

Indonesian disaster authorities say bad weather has hampered rescue efforts and tens of thousands of people have been evacuated, but hundreds remain stranded.

At least 145 people were killed in Thailand's southern province of Songkhla as waters rose 3 meters (10 feet) in one of the worst floods in a decade.

The government announced Saturday that more than 160 people had died across the 10 flood-hit states. More than 3.8 million people are affected.

In Hat Yai City, daily rainfall reached 335 mm, the highest in the past 300 years. As the waters receded, authorities recorded a sharp rise in the death toll.

At one hospital in Hat Yai, staff were forced to transfer bodies to refrigerated trucks because the morgue was full, AFP news agency reported.

“We were stuck in the water for seven days, but no agency came to help us,” Hat Yai resident Tanita Kiahoom told BBC Thai.

The government has promised relief packages including compensation of up to 2 million baht ($62,000) to families who lost family members.

In neighboring Malaysia, the death toll is far lower, but the damage is equally devastating.

Floods wreaked havoc, submerging parts of northern Perlis state, killing two people and forcing tens of thousands of people to seek shelter.

Elsewhere in Asia, Sri Lanka has also been hit by Cyclone Ditwa, with more than 130 people dead and about 170 missing, officials said.

Sri Lanka is also facing its worst weather disaster in recent years, and the government has declared a state of emergency.

Officials said more than 15,000 homes were destroyed and about 78,000 people were evacuated to temporary evacuation centers. They added that about a third of the country has no electricity or running water.

Meteorologists say the extreme weather in Southeast Asia may have been caused by the interaction between Typhoon Koto in the Philippines and Cyclone Senyar, which formed in rare cases in the Strait of Malacca.

The region's annual monsoon season (usually June to September) often brings heavy rainfall.

Climate change is changing patterns such as storm intensity and season length, resulting in heavy rainfall, flash flooding, and high winds.