Disaster relief coordinator Bonar Pasaribu said about 80 to 100 were still unaccounted for in this scenic North Sumatra town, where a wall of water struck late Sunday. He said relatives reported 133 missing, but up to 50 of these may have been out of town.

"We will try our hardest to find these people but the chance of them being alive is slim to none," Pasaribu said. One woman's body was found after being carried dozens of kilometers downstream, he said.

Two German women aged 20 and 26, a 63-year-old Singaporean male, a 30-year-old Dutchman and another 30-year-old man from Austria were among those killed when the flash flood hit the town on the banks of the Bahorok river.

Along with the surging floodwaters came hundreds of logs, felled on the slopes of nearby Gunung (Mount) Leuser national park and washed down the river.

They smashed into scores of homes, many of them tin-roofed bamboo structures, as well as resort cottages on the riverbank.

Pasaribu said about 450 homes or other structures were destroyed along with 35 resort cottages, two mosques and eight bridges.

Hundreds of Brimob paramilitary police and troops used chainsaws to clear huge logs and heavy equipment to remove motorbikes, cars and other debris, as the smell of rotting corpses hung faintly in the air.

Police dogs were brought in to sniff for bodies.

"I am sure there is an impact from illegal logging on the flash flood," said North Sumatra governor Rizal Nurdin, visiting the scene.

"One of the basic problems is lack of political will from the central government to fight illegal logging in Gunung Leuser."

Nurdin said residents would be banned from building along the riverbank in future. "This is a very expensive lesson, paid for by the loss of hundreds of lives," he told reporters.

Bahorok, 96 kilometres (60 miles) northwest of Medan, is on the eastern fringes of the park. It is the home of a famed orangutan refuge, which is popular with tourists who also go trekking and white-water rafting.

Enda Hartanta Bangun, an engineer with a state plantation company, said weeks of heavy rain were partly to blame.

Also, "the water buffer has been severely depleted due to illegal logging in Gunung Leuser. This is not a pure natural disaster," Bangun said.

The region is "very seriously damaged" by random logging, said Longgena Ginting, executive director of environmental group Walhi, in Jakarta.

Severe flooding and landslides, often blamed on deforestation or development of water catchment areas, are common during Indonesia's rainy season.

Residents said Bahorok was hit by floods every year but had never experienced anything like this week's devastation.

Headscarved women in the town sobbed quietly as they waited for news of loved ones.

Nur Rahma, 35, saw three of her children, aged between 18 months and six, swept away. "I still hope my children are alive. I will keep looking till their bodies are found," she said, weeping.

Bodies were laid out in part of a mosque courtyard before being taken to a morgue in Medan. On the other side a shelter had been rigged up for the homeless.

Eight foreigners who escaped the deluge were evacuated to Medan and Binjai.

Some, like Californians Tom Donelly and Tyson Murphy, had miraculous escapes.

"We were asleep when the flash floods hit our room," Donelly, 26, told AFP.

"We were up to our necks and then we were swept out of our room but we managed to grab two trees and climbed up them.

"We were the luckiest people in the world."

TERRA.WIRE