Tens of thousands of people in a major Burmese port city were cut off from contact yesterday after a deadly cyclone tore through the west of the country and neighboring Bangladesh.
Cyclone Mocha made landfall between Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, and Myanmar’s Sittwe packing winds of up to 195kph, the biggest storm to hit the Bay of Bengal in more than a decade.
By late Sunday, the storm had largely passed, sparing the refugee camps housing almost 1 million Rohingya in Bangladesh, where officials said there had been no deaths.
Photo: AFP
Three people were killed in Myanmar, the junta said yesterday, two in Rakhine State and one in southern Ayeyarwady region.
“Some residents were injured” in the storm, the statement said, without giving details, adding that 864 houses and 14 hospitals or clinics had been damaged across the country.
Communications were still down yesterday with Rakhine’s capital, Sittwe, home to about 150,000 people and which bore the brunt of the storm, according to cyclone trackers.
Photo: AFP
The road to Sittwe was littered with trees, pylons and power cables, Agence France-Presse correspondents said, with vehicles full of rescuers and locals trying to reach the city and their relatives forming lines.
“We drove all the way through the cyclone yesterday and cut trees and pushed away pylons ... but then the big trees blocked the road,” an ambulance driver trying to reach Sittwe told reporters.
He and others were using a chainsaw to cut through branches of trees blocking the road.
“I want to go home as fast as I can because we don’t know the situation in Sittwe,” a man from the town said, requesting anonymity. “There is no phone line, there is no Internet... I’m worried for my home and belongings.”
Mocha made landfall on Sunday, bringing a storm surge and high winds that toppled a communications tower in Sittwe, according to images published on social media.
“Everything has been damaged in Sittwe,” one resident who was in the city told reporters.
Junta-affiliated media reported that the storm had put hundreds of base stations, which connect mobile phones to networks, out of action in Rakhine.
Burmese Army Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, head of the military junta, had “instructed officials to make preparations for Sittwe Airport transport relief,” state media reported, without giving details on when relief was expected to arrive.
The UN said communications problems meant it had not yet been able to assess the damage in Rakhine, which has been ravaged by ethnic conflict for years.
“Early reports suggest the damage is extensive,” the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said late on Sunday.
On Bangladesh’s Shah Porir Dwip island, residents began repairing damaged homes, searching through debris and retrieving scattered possessions.
Bangladeshi officials said they had evacuated 750,000 people.
Secretary of the disaster management ministry, Kamrul Hasan, yesterday told reporters that no one had died in the cyclone.
In the Rohingya camps, where about 1 million people live in 190,000 bamboo and tarpaulin shelters, the damage was also minimal, officials said.
“About 300 shelters were destroyed by the cyclone,” deputy refugee commissioner Shamsud Douza said.
The chances of landslides in the camps were also low “due to lack of rain,” Douza said. “The sky has become clear.”
In recent years, better forecasting and more effective evacuation planning have dramatically reduced the death toll from such storms.
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