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TAWANGMANGU (Indonesia) - INDONESIA'S president toured areas hit by deadly landslides on Monday as devastating floods subsided but thousands of residents remained displaced, officials and reports said.
The confirmed death toll from the landslides and floods that struck Central and East Java last week rose to 70 as rescue workers continued hunting for at least 20 missing bodies, according to a tally compiled by AFP.
President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono trudged more than two kilometres in rubber boots to get to the worst landslide, in Karanganyar district, where he met with volunteers and victims' families.
'Thank you all for your help... This is a natural disaster, a disaster for all of us,' Mr Yudhoyono told them before travelling on to visit flood victims elsewhere.
Search and rescue workers hunted manually for three missing people in the district, while in adjacent Wonogiri, where landslides also engulfed homes, eight people remained missing. One body was found on Sunday, a Red Cross official, Warjo, told the Detikcom online news portal.
'We are still searching for victims. Heavy machinery has arrived and will make the search easier,' he reportedly said.
A separate search was ongoing in the village of Semangin where a family of seven were feared to have been buried in another landslide, he added.
In Semarang district, another landslide buried a house with two people believed inside, health ministry official Rustam Pakaya told AFP.
Thousands of homes along the Bengawan Solo river, the longest on Indonesia's main island of Java, have been inundated following torrential rains.
A Red Cross official told AFP that water levels had receded in most districts, though gone up in Kudus, but thousands of people remained in makeshift shelters as floodwaters still swirled through their homes.
While overall figures for the number of displaced were unavailable, Budi Sulityono, a senior official in Ngawi, one of the worst flood-soaked districts, told Detik.com that 55,000 people were in shelters there.
He said four lives had been claimed in the district in the past four days.
In East Java, where raging floods swept away a major bridge in Madiun, killing at least two children, a policeman told AFP that reinforcements had arrived to boost a search for an unknown number of missing people.
Landslides and flooding are common in Indonesia during the rainy season, which hits a peak from December to February. -- AFP
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