SYLHET, Bangladesh —
Monsoon storms in Bangladesh and India have
killed at least 59 people and unleashed devastating floods that left millions
of others stranded, officials said Saturday.
اضافة اعلان
Floods are a
regular menace to millions of people in low-lying
Bangladesh, but experts say
climate change is increasing their frequency, ferocity, and unpredictability.
Relentless
downpours over the past week have inundated vast stretches of Bangladesh’s
northeast, with troops deployed to evacuate households cut off from neighboring
communities.
Schools have
been turned into relief shelters to house entire villages inundated in a matter
of hours by rivers that suddenly burst their banks.
“The whole
village went under water by early Friday and we all got stranded,” said Lokman,
whose family lives in Companiganj village.
“After waiting a
whole day on the roof of our home, a neighbor rescued us with a makeshift boat.
My mother said she has never seen such floods in her entire life,” the
23-year-old added.
Asma Akter,
another woman rescued from the rising waters, said her family had not been able
to eat for two days.
“The water rose
so quickly we couldn’t bring any of our things,” she said. “And how can you
cook anything when everything is underwater?”
Lightning
triggered by the storms has killed at least 21 people around the
South Asian
nation since Friday afternoon, police officials told AFP.
Among them were
three children aged between 12 and 14 who were struck by lightning on Friday in
the rural town of Nandail, said local police chief Mizanur Rahman.
Another four
people died when landslides hit their hillside homes in the port city of
Chittagong, police inspector Nurul Islam told AFP.
At least 16
people have been killed since Thursday in India’s remote Meghalaya, the state’s
chief minister Conrad Sangma wrote on Twitter, after landslides and surging
rivers that submerged roads.
Next door in
Assam, more than 2.6 million people have been affected by floods after five
days of incessant downpours, according to the state’s disaster response agency.
Eighteen people
had died in flood waters or landslides around the state since Thursday, the
agency reported, with nearly 7,500 people rescued on Saturday by mid-afternoon.
Assam chief
minister
Himanta Biswa Sarma told reporters he had instructed district
officials to provide “all necessary help and relief” to those caught in the
flooding.
‘The situation is
bad’
Flooding in Bangladesh worsened on Saturday morning after a temporary
reprieve from the rains the previous afternoon, Sylhet region chief government
administrator Mosharraf Hossain told AFP.
“The situation
is bad. More than 4 million people have been stranded by flood water,” Hossain
said, adding that nearly the entire region was without electricity.
The flooding
forced Bangladesh’s third-largest international airport in Sylhet to shut down
on Friday.
Around the regional
capital, residents waded through waist-deep water along roads next to partially
submerged stuck vehicles.
Forecasters said
the floods were set to worsen over the next two days with heavy rains in
Bangladesh and upstream in India’s northeast.
Before this week’s
rains, the
Sylhet region was still recovering from its worst floods in nearly
two decades late last month, when at least 10 people were killed and four
million others were affected.
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