HANOI?The death toll from Tropical Storm Ondoy (international codename: Ketsana) in Laos has risen to 24, the country's Red Cross said on Saturday as an aid agency reported flooding "as far as the eye can see" in one province.

Seven people who refused to leave their homes in southernmost Attapeu province accounted for most of the additional deaths, said Bountheung Menvilay, head of the disaster preparedness division for the Lao Red Cross.

Their houses were swept into a river, he said.

On Friday, when details of the tragedy began to emerge from one of Asia's poorest nations, Bountheung reported 16 deaths from the storm which moved through the country on Wednesday.

Ondoy has brought devastation across Southeast Asia, first killing at least 293 people in the Philippines last weekend before striking Vietnam, where at least 107 died, and Cambodia where it claimed 17 lives.

Attapeu province borders Cambodia and, along with adjacent Sekong province, has been the hardest hit in Laos, aid workers said.

"There is water as far as the eye can see. Rivers are converging across roads now," Caitlin Makin, head of the Attapeu office of the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), said in a statement on Saturday.

More than 90 percent of Attapeu's land has been flooded, affecting 110,000 out of a total population of 117,000 people, WFP said.

Detailed information from the rugged region -- hard to reach even in normal times -- has been difficult to obtain, aid workers said.

"Now I cannot contact Sekong branch," the Red Cross official said, referring to his unit in the province.

He said 103 people were missing but there was no update on the number of people displaced, which on Friday he put at 37,500.

In Sekong alone about 25,000 people have lost either their homes, gardens or livestock, said Henry Braun, Laos director for the aid agency CARE, which is leading the relief effort in that province.

"Most of them have lost everything," he said late Friday.

CARE staff reached two villages which each had only one in 25 houses still standing, Braun said.

WFP said rice and canned fish from its stockpile were distributed by the government on Friday in Sekong, where access was only possible by boat and helicopter.

Attapeu remained inaccessible, it said.