Emergency teams raced to rescue cyclone survivors in the remote southwest of Bangladesh yesterday as the death toll from the storm rose to 180.
Cyclone Aila slammed into the coast of Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal on Monday, leaving hundreds of thousands of people homeless after a tidal surge washed away villages, roads and livestock.
Military and civil relief workers struggled to deliver food, fresh water and shelters to regions worst affected by the surge of sea water and destructive high winds, authorities in Dhaka said.
PHOTO: AP
About 110 people were killed in Bangladesh and 70 more died in India, officials said.
Bangladesh’s disaster management minister Abdur Razzak said conditions on the ground were desperate but that a major relief and rescue operation was in full swing.
“We have adequate resources to ensure food, relief and rehabilitation, and we’ll work for as long as it takes to reach those affected,” Razzak said.
In India’s West Bengal, the cyclone hit the state capital of Kolkata, bringing down trees and electricity pylons and smashing cars.
About 20 of those killed died a day after the storm in mudslides caused by rainfall in the hill resort Darjeeling, the state’s chief secretary Asoke Mohon Chakraborty said.
“The cyclone traveled through northern districts of the state and heavy downpours triggered over 40 landslides on Tuesday,” he said.
Chakraborty said that he expected further fatalities to be reported as relief workers reached outlying villages.
The storm caused havoc in the Sundarbans, the world’s largest mangrove forest and home to several protected species of tigers.
Conservationists have been unable to confirm if the animals had been affected in the forest, which straddles India and Bangladesh.
“Many islands and a large swath of the mangrove forest in the Sundarbans are still under water,” Chakraborty said. “We have been dropping food to marooned people by helicopter.”
In Bangladesh, at least 250,000 people were stranded in the hard-hit districts of Koyra and Dakope.
“People are half-fed or not fed at all. There is a huge crisis with no drinking water as all the wells and ponds are submerged by salty seawater,” Koyra chief Arif Pasha told reporters by telephone. “In some places there is no dry land for a proper air drop.”
In Dakope, in the heart of the Sundarbans, 100,000 people remained in the cyclone shelters where they took refuge as the storm hit.
Many of the casualties in Bangladesh were children. In one village in Satkhira district, a dam burst and 23 people were swept out to sea and drowned, officials said.
The low-lying region frequently experiences tropical storms and cyclones during the monsoon season.
AERIAL INCURSIONS: The incidents are a reminder that Russia’s aggressive actions go beyond Ukraine’s borders, Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrii Sybiha said Two NATO members on Sunday said that Russian drones violated their airspace, as one reportedly flew into Romania during nighttime attacks on neighboring Ukraine, while another crashed in eastern Latvia the previous day. A drone entered Romanian territory early on Sunday as Moscow struck “civilian targets and port infrastructure” across the Danube in Ukraine, the Romanian Ministry of National Defense said. It added that Bucharest had deployed F-16 warplanes to monitor its airspace and issued text alerts to residents of two eastern regions. It also said investigations were underway of a potential “impact zone” in an uninhabited area along the Romanian-Ukrainian border. There
The governor of Ohio is to send law enforcement and millions of dollars in healthcare resources to the city of Springfield as it faces a surge in temporary Haitian migrants. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine on Tuesday said that he does not oppose the Temporary Protected Status program under which about 15,000 Haitians have arrived in the city of about 59,000 people since 2020, but said the federal government must do more to help affected communities. On Monday, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost directed his office to research legal avenues — including filing a lawsuit — to stop the federal government from sending
A Zurich city councilor has apologized and reportedly sought police protection against threats after she fired a sport pistol at an auction poster of a 14th-century Madonna and child painting, and posted images of their bullet-ridden faces on social media. Green-Liberal party official Sanija Ameti, 32, put the images on Instagram over the weekend before quickly pulling them down. She later wrote on social media that she had been practicing shots from about 10m and only found the poster as “big enough” for a suitable target. “I apologize to the people who were hurt by my post. I deleted it immediately when I
At first, Francis Ari Sture thought a human was trying to shove him down the steep Norwegian mountainside. Then he saw the golden eagle land. “We are staring at each other for, maybe, a whole minute,” Sture said on Monday. “I’m trying to think what’s in its mind.” The bird then attacked Sture five more times on Thursday last week, scratching and clawing the 31-year-old bicycle courier’s face and arms over 10 to 15 minutes as he sprinted down the mountain. The same eagle is believed to be responsible for attacks on three other people across a vast mountainous area of southern Norway