Death toll due to Sitrang cyclone climbs to 28 as Bangladesh asses damages
Dhaka, Oct 26 (EFE).- Rescue teams in Bangladesh on Wednesday recovered four bodies from a capsized boat in a channel in the Bay of Bengal, taking the death toll from cyclone Sitrang to 28 in the south Asian country.
“So far we have recovered four bodies from the boat,” fire service deputy assistant director Harun Pasha told EFE.
At least eight people were presumed to have been inside the boat in the Sandwip channel, close to the port of Chittagong, on the night the cyclone made landfall.
The cyclone made landfall at 9pm near Bhola district on Monday with a wind speed of around 90 kilometers per hour (56 miles per hour), causing torrential rains and leaving behind a trail of destruction in different parts of the country.
Sitrang lost lost momentum on Tuesday, turning into a low depression.
The authorities evacuated a total of 605,615 people to some 7,000 coastal shelters, with the help of 76,000 volunteers.
According to a preliminary assessment, at least 3,028 houses have been completely damaged and 6,904 partially destroyed by the storm, disaster management ministry official Robiul Islam told EFE.
Badal Chandra Das, a spokesperson of the Department of Agriculture Extension, said that around 90,113 hectares of land in 31 districts has been affected.
“We continue our assessment. Until a week goes by, we may not get a clear picture” of the total magnitude of the damage caused, he stressed.
The Bay of Bengal region, which includes Bangladesh and parts of India, is prone to cyclones due to its geographic location, and they occur mostly between April and May, and October-November.
The last major cyclone to hit the country was Amphan, which killed nearly 100 people in Bangladesh and neighboring India in May 2020.
However, with the support of data from Indian meteorological satellites, India and Bangladesh then managed to evacuate nearly three million people in time, thus avoiding catastrophes like that of 1999, when a similar cyclone hit Odisha and left more than 9,000 dead. EFE
am-mvg/sc
