Shah Alam | The death toll rose Tuesday to 14 dead and more than 70,000 displaced in Malaysia after the worst floods in the Southeast Asian country in several years, while the army distributed food by boat to people still trapped in their homes.
Torrential rains over the weekend caused flooding in several towns and villages, cutting off major roads.
One of the worst affected regions is Selangor, the richest and most densely populated state in the country, which surrounds the capital Kuala Lumpur.
Parts of the state capital, Shah Alam, were still underwater on Tuesday, and soldiers in boats distributed food to people stranded in their homes and government shelters.
“My house is totally damaged, my two cars are broken,” Kartik Subramany told AFP. “These are the worst floods of my life.”
He fled his home as the floodwaters rose, and took refuge in a school for 48 hours before being evacuated with his family to a shelter.
In a hard-hit Shah Alam neighborhood, an AFP journalist saw people desperate for food grab items from a devastated supermarket.
A first assessment reported seven dead, but it increased Tuesday to 14 dead, including eight in Selangor and six in the eastern state of Pahang, according to the official Bernama news agency.
But that number could rise, with many people still missing.
More than 71,000 people were forced to leave their homes because of the floods, including 41,000 in Pahang (center) and 27,000 in Selangor, according to official data.
Evacuees are being accommodated in government relief centers, but officials have warned that an increase in coronavirus cases linked to crowded shelters is to be expected.
The rain stopped on Monday, allowing residents to return to their devastated homes and collect their belongings.
Malaysia suffers from annual flooding during the rainy season, but the weekend floods were the worst since 2014, when more than 100,000 people were forced from their homes.
The role of global warming has been pointed out in the worsening of flooding.