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Cyclone smashes into impoverished Bangladesh
2007-11-15
A fierce cyclone packing extreme winds and torrential rain ripped through southwestern Bangladesh overnight Thursday, wiping out countless homes in one of the world's poorest countries. Cyclone Sidr, visible in satellite images as a colossal white swirling mass racing north from the Bay of Bengal, was described as the worst storm in years as it hit land near Bangladesh's border with India. "The cyclone has battered Bangladeshi coastal areas. The velocity of the wind in that area is 220 to 240 kilometres (140 to 155 miles and hour). (This) is a violent storm," said Samarendra Karmakar, the head of the Bangladeshi meteorological department. The storm matched one in 1991 that sparked a tidal wave and killed an estimated 138,000 people, Karmakar told AFP. But he said he was optimistic that a major effort this time to evacuate villages and place people in special shelters could mean low-lying Bangladesh would be spared a significant loss of life. "It is not less severe than the 1991 cyclone, in some places it is more severe. But we are expecting less casualties this time because the government took early measures. We alerted people to be evacuated early," he said. Damage to property and infrastructure would, however, be severe, said an official at the ministry of disaster management and relief. "Nothing can be predicted now but we expect the damage to be enormous," said the official. "The storm is still moving with great intensity." Thousands of tin and bamboo homes had been flattened and phone and power cables snapped in southern districts, the private UNB news agency said. "Initial dispatches sent by correspondents said the cyclonic storm flattened innumerable thatched houses," the agency said, giving the first concrete assessment of the damage. So far only one death has been reported -- an elderly man who drowned when a boat crossing a river with 17 passengers capsized. Officials in both Bangladesh and across the border in India -- which is also expecting highly destructive winds and torrential rains -- have been racing to evacuate hundreds of thousands of people from the coast over the past 48 hours. Karmakar said rivers in the Sunderbans area, a vast mangrove forest straddling the India-Bangladesh border and the natural habitat of endangered Royal Bengal tigers, were also swollen as the storm moved north in the direction of the capital Dhaka. An official in Barisal, 120 kilometres south of Dhaka, spoke of severe destruction as the 500 kilometre-wide mass of cloud passed overhead. "Many trees have been uprooted and houses and schools blown away," Mostofa Kamal, a district relief and rehabilitation officer, told AFP by telephone. People in Bangladesh's south and centre have bunkered down for the storm, with even the country's main sea port at Chittagong, to the east of the cyclone's path, also closed. Officials in India's coastal state of West Bengal also reported destruction along India's part of the Sunderbans. There were no immediate reports of casualties there. "Mud huts have been damaged and the roofs of several houses blown off," said the state's relief minister, Mortaza Hossain. "The army has been put on alert, (and) more than 100,000 coastal villagers have been evacuated." Authorities in India have been told to halt rail and other transportation in some areas due to the likelihood of heavy floods, said Ladu Ram Meena, deputy director of the weather centre for India's eastern region. He said large-scale damage to power and communication lines was also expected. Cyclone Sidr is expected to totally fizzle out on Saturday over India's northeast, and just south of the mountain kingdom of Bhutan. Disaster prone Bangladesh's worst cyclone disaster was in 1970, when some half a million people died.
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