Video: Road collapses in Indonesia amid Southeast Asia's deadly floods

A harrowing scene depicts a massive section of a rural highway in West Sumatra, Indonesia, that has catastrophically collapsed into a yawning chasm, likely due to recent flash floods and subsequent landslides. 

In the video, the precarious gap road, roughly 20-30 metres wide, continued to widen, as part of the asphalt road collapses in huge chunks of earth and tar.

The video captured the incident in late November 2025 during one of Southeast Asia's most devastating natural disasters.

Filmed by local resident Muhammad Azhari, the clip shows dozens of locals and motorists nonchalantly traversing the precarious gap on foot and by motorcycle, while police in helmets stand guard amid stranded vehicles and heavy machinery. 

Towering volcanic mountains loom in the misty background, underscoring the region's vulnerability to erosion. 

This stretch of road, believed to be near the Twin Bridges area, was severed when torrential rains — exceeding 500mm in days — saturated unstable slopes, triggering mudflows that devoured the asphalt overnight on November 25. 

Rescue teams, hampered by the isolation, used excavators to clear 1.5 meters of mud, but access remains perilous, stranding aid and exacerbating food shortages.

This collapse is a stark emblem of the 2025 Southeast Asia floods and landslides, a hydrometeorological catastrophe fuelled by a rare cyclone off the Indian Ocean, prolonged monsoons, and rampant deforestation from illegal logging and palm oil plantations. 

Striking from mid-November, the disaster ravaged Indonesia's Sumatra (West, North, and Aceh provinces), Thailand, Malaysia, and Sri Lanka, claiming over 1,300 lives region-wide — 708 in Indonesia alone, with 504 missing, as per Reuters and local media reports.

Villages buried

In West Sumatra, 165 fatalities were recorded, including 120 from Agam Regency's flash floods, where entire villages were buried.

Over 3.2 million Indonesians were affected, with 1 million evacuated; 2,600 injured amid scenes of families clinging to rooftops and trees. 

Infrastructure crumbled: 31 roads and 24 bridges damaged in Aceh, countless more in Sumatra, paralysing the Tarutung-Sibolga highway under 3-meter-deep debris.

Environmentalists decry how stripped forests amplified runoff, turning rivulets into raging torrents — a pattern echoing 2018's Sulawesi tsunami but deadlier due to climate change. 

Indonesia President Prabowo Subianto deployed 34,000 tonnes of rice and military helicopters, but critics demand probes into logging's role. 

As rains persist into December, survivors like those at the collapse site embody resilience, yet the toll mounts, a grim reminder of nature’s fury in a warming world.