Scores of people were drowned in mud and surging rivers yesterday after days of intense rain caused floods and landslides across the Indonesian islands of Java and Bali exactly three years after the Indian Ocean tsunami hit the archipelago.

At least 81 people were reported to have died in the province of Central Java in midnight mudslides that swamped villages in the Karanganyar, Wonogiri and Sukoharjo districts. Thousands of houses were inundated, from Java and Sumatra to Sulawesi island, farther east, witnesses and media reports said.

Local officials said that they were the worst landslides that they had encountered in a quarter of a century and that many more bodies were expected to be recovered from the mud as rescue efforts continued over the next few days.

“The last report we received at 16.00 [9am GMT] shows that 66 people in Karanganyar district are dead or missing,” Heru Aji Pratomo, the head of an Indonesian disaster management centre, said. He added that 36 bodies had been retrieved.

Residents struggled to salvage valued possessions from the rising waters, some using tyres to float televisions and refrigerators to higher ground. Hundreds of soldiers, police and volunteers were trying to get heavy-lifting equipment to affected villages on the main island of Java, Eko Prayitno, the head of the local search and rescue department, said, adding that blocked roads caused by rain and high waters were hampering their efforts. Soldiers and police also joined local people in affected areas to sift through mud and rubble with spades and bamboo poles. Some dug with bare hands through the mud in search of survivors.

Villagers in Karanganyar were swamped by mud as they held a celebration after finally cleaning a house inundated in a previous landslide.

“They were having dinner together when they were hit by another landslide,” Prayitno said. “At least 61 people were buried.”

Another rescuer told Agence France Presse in the Tawangmangu district: “The conditions here are very bad and steep, so that we cannot use heavy machinery.”

In Wonogiri district, 17 people were feared to have died when landslides hit their homes after 12 hours of nonstop rain.

Ten people died in the province of East Java, where a bridge in Madiun district was carried away by rising waters. A family of four drowned in Ngawi, while on the island of Bali a lesser landslide killed two people in a village in Gianyar.

The dramatic geography and geology of Indonesia bring with them regular and dramatic natural disasters, from storms, floods and mudslides to erupting volcanoes, earthquakes and tsunami.

The disasters occurred on the third anniversary of the Asian tsunami, which killed 230,000 people in a dozen nations. Two thirds of those deaths occurred on neighbouring Sumatra, more than 1,400 miles away. Yesterday people across the Indian Ocean region remembered the moment, early on the morning of Boxing Day 2004, when the greatest tsunami in living memory crashed into the coastlines of 12 countries, killing 230,000 people.

About 169,000 of them were in Indonesia, mainly in the north-western-most province of Aceh, on the island of Sumatra.

Flooding has become a very common problem for many of the Indonesian communities, which tend to be concentrated along lowlying coasts and valleys beneath steep mountains.

Excessive logging has removed the dense forests that used to bind together the mountainsides and hold back the waters, consequently making landslides more likely.

Many scientists believe that extremes of rain and drought are also a consequence of climate change that has been caused by greenhouse gas emissions.

Especially jolting, from the point of view of Indonesian business, was an incident last month when the road to Jakarta international airport was cut off by a surging high tide.

President Yudhoyono relayed his sympathies to the families of the deceased. “The President sends his deepest condolences and has ordered the Home Affairs Minister to coordinate with local officials and monitor the emergency response,” Andi Mallarangeng, his spokesman, said.

The President had earlier attended a tree-planting ceremony in Banten province to promote landslide and flood-prevention efforts. A tsunami warning drill on Java was unaffected by yesterday’s landslides.

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