Scores of people drowned in their homes yesterday when a decaying dam collapsed, releasing a freshwater tsunami. At least 58 people were killed in Cireundeu, a suburb of Jakarta, the Indonesian capital, when the earthen dam holding back the Situ Gintung lake collapsed and released 2 million cubic metres (70 million cubic feet) of water in a wave 6 metres (20ft) high.

Forty houses were submerged and relatives of those who lived there picked through thick mud and streets blocked with trees and rubble to find their loved ones. Bodies were dragged several miles in the muddy current.

The survivors described narrow escapes in darkness at 2am. “We were on the second floor but my daughter went back downstairs when the window broke and water gushed in,” Dewi Masitoh, a 40-year old woman, said. “My husband jumped in and pulled [her] out of the water by her neck. I punched a hole through the roof and we all climbed up.”

Ghufron, a 17-year-old student, said: “By the time I woke up the water was up to my nose. I climbed to the roof to save myself. I heard people screaming and shouting.” A 63-year old man named Cecep Rahman lost his wife, his son and daughter-in-law, and their daughter. “I heard a crashing sound and looked out my window,” he said. “The tide was so strong, like a tsunami. They were swept away. There was nothing I could do.”

The nearby Muhammadiyah University was turned into an emergency centre and makeshift morgue. Soldiers and police carried bodies and laid them on the floor of a mosque to be prepared for burial.

The 40ft dam which created the artificial lake was 76 years old and built during the Dutch colonial period. It gave way after a stretch of very heavy rain. Local people suggested that construction work close to the dam wall may also have undermined it.

“A lot of new homes were being built near the dam. I believe that may have caused the earth making up the dam to loosen,” a man named Supeje Sugeng said. “I saw water seeping through since midnight. When it broke, it was sudden and it sounded like thunder.”

A former official at the public works ministry said that maintenance of the dam had been neglected because of a lack of money.

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