DHAKA, Bangladesh —
Bangladesh rescue
workers found the bodies of four missing crew of a dredger boat, taking the
death toll from Cyclone Sitrang to 28 as millions remained without power,
officials said Wednesday.
اضافة اعلان
Cyclones — the equivalent of hurricanes in the
Atlantic or typhoons in the Pacific — are a regular menace in the region but
scientists say climate change is likely making them more intense and frequent.
Cyclone Sitrang made landfall in southern Bangladesh
on Monday but authorities managed to get about a million people to safety
before the monster storm hit.
With winds of 80km/h, it still left a trail of
devastation in the country’s densely populated, low-lying coastal region, which
is home to tens of millions of people.
The government said nearly 10,000 tin-roofed homes
were either “destroyed or damaged” and crops on large swathes of farmland were
wrecked at a time of record-high food inflation.
Fire department divers found the bodies of four crew
of a dredger boat that sank during the storm in the Bay of Bengal.
“We found one body on Tuesday night and three more
this morning. Four crew are still missing,” Abdullah Pasha from the fire
department told AFP.
Nearly five million people were still without power
on Wednesday, Rural Electrification Board official Debashish Chakrabarty told
AFP.
Nearly a million people who were evacuated from
low-lying regions have now returned to their homes.
Trees were uprooted as far away as the capital
Dhaka, hundreds of kilometers from the storm’s center.
Heavy rains lashed much of the country, flooding
cities such as Dhaka, Khulna and Barisal — which took on 324mm of rainfall on
Monday.
About 33,000 Rohingya refugees from Myanmar,
controversially relocated from the mainland to a storm-prone island, were
ordered to stay indoors but there were no reports of casualties or damage,
officials said.
In recent years, better forecasting and more
effective evacuation planning have dramatically reduced the death toll from
such storms.
The worst recorded, in 1970, killed hundreds of
thousands of people.
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