Landslide kills toddler as bad weather pummels the island

After hours of an exhausting search involving various agencies, the body of a 1-year-old toddler buried in a landslide in Mengwi, Badung, was retrieved at about 4 p.m. on Sunday.

An air of numbing desolation descended on the site of the accident when scores of rescue workers witnessed in silence as the tiny, lifeless body was picked up, wrapped in new cloth and rushed into the nearby Kapal regional hospital, ending a search that started on Saturday night.

The toddler, identified as Putu Ayu Fitriani, was with her mother Ni Putu Putri, 25, and her grandmother Made Sumiati at their family food stall when the tragedy took place.

They were about to close the stall and head home when a heavy downpour forced them to take shelter inside the stall.

The stall was one of dozens of similar stalls that lined the street facing the gate of Taman Ayun, the royal temple of the Mengwi kingdom and a popular tourist attraction in the regency.

A narrow sidewalk separated the stalls from a steep ravine behind them. At the bottom of the ravine is a shallow river.

The disaster was triggered by a powerful windstorm and torrential rain that battered the region mercilessly since 9 p.m. Saturday night.  

At 11:35 p.m., the ground under the stall broke loose and dragged the back part of the stall down the ravine. Two other empty stalls shared the same fate.

“I was in the front part of the stall and clung tightly to the wall. My daughter and granddaughter were resting in the back part of the stall when the landslide swept them away,” grandmother Sumiati recalled. Her daughter survived.

Saturday’s bad weather caused damage across the island. In the northern coastal regency of Buleleng, landslides and floods inflicted heavy damage on several roads and bridges, including the main road connecting the regency with Kintamani in the neighboring regency of Bangli. The worst-hit area was Tambakan village in Kubutambahan subdistrict, where gale-force winds damaged 76 houses.

On Sunday morning, local communities organized work parties to clear the streets of mud and debris.

In Denpasar, a windstorm injured two people and uprooted dozens of trees. No fatalities were reported despite rumors, mainly through social media, that 100 lives had been lost in Nusa Dua. The news irritated the disaster authority, which claimed that it had created unnecessary alarm.

“It was not true and the news was certainly fabricated and distributed by irresponsible individuals,” provincial disaster mitigation agency chief Gde Made Jaya Serataberana stressed.

He urged the public to exercise caution regarding information from unidentified sources and asked them to contact the agency’s call center at (0361) 251177 or its website at balisafety.baliprov.go.id for accurate information on disasters.