At least 1,400 people have died as a result of flooding and landslides across Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia, with many more still missing.
The unusual combination of a tropical typhoon and two tropical cyclones is behind the mounting humanitarian disaster. Scientists and meteorologists note that Cyclone Senyar formed just north of the equator, which is extremely unusual. The unlikely phenomenon and combination of three separate storms have turbo-charged the damage across the region.
“I have covered natural disasters, and usually, there is an area where landslides are contained, but this time, landslides have affected all the villages that we saw as we made our way here,” Al Jazeera reporter Jessica Washington said of her on-the-ground observations in Sumatra, an island in northern Indonesia with a population of 60 million.
In Thailand, the city of Hat Yai near the Malaysian border experienced 335 millimeters (13 inches) of rain in one day, the highest rainfall recorded there in 300 years.
“By 9 a.m., the water was chest deep,” gas station worker Jantarakarn Kaewjan from Hat Yai told Reuters. “It was all caused by rain.”
Typhoon Koto in the South China Sea traveled from the Philippines toward Vietnam while Cyclone Ditwah caused devastation across the southern tip of Sri Lanka. At the same time, the Malacca Strait, a narrow strip of water between Malaysia and Indonesia, very near the equator, experienced a cyclone, Cyclone Senyar, for the first time in 135 years.
“This is something we haven’t seen before in our monitoring activity,” Mrutyunjay Mohapatra, director-general of the India Meteorological Department, told India Today, calling Senyar’s development in the Malacca Strait a “rare weather occurrence.” That’s because near the equator there’s not enough Coriolis force from the rotation of the Earth to cause the spinning of a cyclone.
According to Steve Turton, an adjunct professor of environmental geography at CQUniversity Australia, one reason the cyclones caused so much damage is that parts of the area impacted, including Indonesia and Malaysia, are not accustomed to such extreme weather events.
“The near-simultaneous emergence of these intense storms isn’t unheard of, and equatorial cyclones are rare but known,” Turton wrote in The Conversation. “But the devastation is extraordinary.”
According to Turton, scientists still don’t know if there is a climate link but noted that climate change is expected to trigger fewer but more intense cyclones.
Banner image: Flood survivors use logs to cross a river in Batang Toru, North Sumatra, Indonesia, on Dec. 2, 2025. Image by AP Photo/Binsar Bakkara.
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