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n already soggy Friday morning was quickly soaked in tears as the nation awoke to the horror of an inland tsunami that struck poor and affluent alike in the Cireundeu area, South Tangerang.

As the sun broke through the clouds to shed light on the tragedy, emergency crews raced to rescue survivors and shelter those turned out of their homes by a wall of water gushing madly from a collapsed sluice gate at the 21-hectare Situ Gintung Lake.

In a nation fraught with a seemingly endless onslaught of disasters, updates throughout the day were eerily familiar as the body count mounted.

By 10 p.m., no less than 58 confirmed dead were reported and countless others injured.

The number of missing rose throughout the night, with fears that by the weekend the toll could swell over 100.

But this latest disaster may have not been all nature's work alone. The foreboding signs were already there, according to some.

"We saw a large hole at the sluice gate Thursday morning," Mulyadi, a resident living near the lake's sluice gate, told The Jakarta Post.

As the downpour became incessant throughout the day, so too did the damage to the sluice gate. By 5 p.m., the hole had grown larger.

The streaming current began undermining the 76-year-old embankment walls on which the aging sluice foundation rested.

"By 9 p.m., the situation became worrying. We told people to vacate their homes," Mulyadi said, adding most residents kept a cautious watch outside their homes.

But caution could not deter the fury of an estimated 1 million cubic meters of water, which according to residents, burst over the nearby Kampung Poncol at 4:30 a.m.

"The gate collapsed. Water from the lake spilled like a tsunami.

"I could save nothing but my family," Mulyadi said.

But his fate and that of many in the immediate neighborhood unit (RT) 1, 2 and 3 was better than most.

According to witnesses, most fatalities occurred in RT 4, occupying low-lying land, who stayed indoors either because they were not given sufficient warning or were oblivious to the impending danger.

Community unit (RW) 8 head Darman Purba, tasked with supervising RT heads, said the warnings spared residents of RTs 1 to 3. He claimed he and several police officers had warned RT 4, but in vain.

By 7 a.m., as Jakartans sped to work, Cireundeu was a ground zero of obliteration.

The police's Mobile Brigade arrived on the scene as rescue teams floated on rubber dinghies to search for bodies and help survivors.

The living and dead were covered in debris and mud alike.

Makeshift shelters were quickly set up in nearby buildings and houses. The Ahmad Dahlan School of Economics (STIE), University of Muhammadiyah Jakarta (UMJ) and Cirendeu Permai housing complex became a sudden haven for the homeless and helpless.

They, like many others watching in horror, wondered how Jakarta's worst single-day tragedy since the 1987 Bintaro train crash, which killed 139, could have happened.

Recriminations soon boiled over as residents claimed they had long been concerned with the condition of the sluice gate, which was already rotting in parts and had not functioned properly for two years.

"We first found leaks at the sluice gate in early 2007; we reported it to Pak Naseh, an official at the Tangerang regency Irrigation Agency, who daily controls the lake," said RT 1 resident Taufik.

However, no response was forthcoming.

Through a river and lake normalization program last year, the government built an embankment jogging track on the lake's eastern shore, while the feeble sluice gate to the north was ignored.