Divers from the fire department have found the bodies of four crew members of a dredging boat that sank in the passage of the cyclone in the Bay of Bengal.
Sitrang made landfall on Monday evening in the south of the country. The authorities had managed to organize the evacuation to shelters of around a million people, before he struck.
“We found one body on Tuesday evening and three more this morning (Wednesday). Four crew members are still missing,” Abdullah Pasha of the fire department told AFP.
In addition, nearly five million people are still without power on Wednesday, Debashish Chakrabarty, an official with the Rural Electrification Bureau, told AFP.
According to the government, nearly 10,000 dilapidated houses with tin roofs have been “destroyed or damaged” and vegetable crops have been devastated on large tracts of agricultural land.
Nearly one million people who had been evacuated from lowland areas have now returned to their homes.
Trees were uprooted even in the capital Dhaka which, hundreds of kilometers from the cyclone, also suffered torrential rains like a large part of the country on Monday.
About 33,000 Rohingya refugees on the storm-prone island of Bhashan Char in the Bay of Bengal have been told not to come out. No casualties or damage were reported, authorities said.
Bangladesh, a country of about 170 million inhabitants, is ranked among the countries most affected by extreme weather events since the beginning of the century, according to the UN.
Global warming is likely to make cyclones more intense and more frequent in South Asian countries bordering the Bay of Bengal, scientists say, but evacuation procedures have also greatly improved thanks to forecasts. more precise.
In 2020, Cyclone Amphan, the second “super cyclone” ever recorded in the Bay of Bengal, killed more than 100 people in Bangladesh and India and left millions affected.
