Cyclone Sidr kills 200 in Bangladesh

DHAKA: Cyclone Sidr battered southern Bangladesh killing more than 200 people as it uprooted trees, destroyed homes and forced tens of thousands to flee for their lives, officials said on Friday.

The eye of Cyclone Sidr, shown in satellite images as a huge swirling white mass that raced up the Bay of Bengal, crashed into the coast on Thursday night before sweeping north towards the capital Dhaka.

"The death toll has risen to above 200 and we are still getting more reports of deaths," said Mohammad Ashrafuzzaman, officer-in-charge of the control room at the ministry of relief and disaster management.

Most deaths were caused by trees crushing flimsy homes. In central Madaripur, a reporter saw village after village devastated. Thousands of shacks made of bamboo and tin were flattened.

Madaripur shopkeeper Nazrul Islam, 40, said his house had been razed by the fury of the wind and rain.

"It was a terrible night. I have never seen such a huge storm in my life. My house has collapsed and hundreds of others have also been blown away," he said.

"I cannot describe how devastating it was. It was like doomsday, the most frightening five hours of my life. I thought I would never see my family again," small businessman Mollik Tariqur Rahman, 40, said from southwestern Bagerhat district, one of the worst-hit.

"There is a trail of destruction everywhere; we can't even detect exactly where were our houses were built, only a few are left and they do not have roofs," he said.

Wind speeds of 220-240 kilometres (140-155 miles) an hour were recorded in what officials described as one of the biggest storms in years.

Telephone lines and power supplies were also snapped. Hundreds of thousands of people spent the night in special shelters in a bid to avoid the massive casualties of previous major cyclones.

The dead included an elderly man who drowned when a boat carrying 17 people across a river in southern Satkhira district capsised during the storm. The other passengers were able to swim ashore, an official said.

Experts described Sidr as similar in strength to the 1991 storm that triggered a tidal wave that killed an estimated 138,000 people.

Another cyclone in 1970 killed up to half a million people in the disaster-prone and impoverished country.

Bangladesh has since set up an early warning system and a network of shelters in vulnerable coastal areas.

The head of the Bangladeshi meteorological department, Samarendra Karmakar, said he was optimistic the evacuation programme would spare the country the huge loss of life seen in previous decades.

"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.

Source: timesofindia.indiatimes.com