(Feni) Nearly 300,000 Bangladeshis have fled to emergency shelters after floods hit the Southeast Asian country, which has just been hit by a political earthquake, according to rescue officials.
Triggered by heavy monsoon rains, the floods have killed at least 42 people in Bangladesh and India since the start of the week, many in landslides.
“My house is completely flooded,” Lufton Nahar, 60, told AFP at a shelter in Feni, a district close to the border with the Indian state of Tripura and among the worst-hit.
“The water is flowing over our roof,” he continues. “My brother brought us here by boat. Otherwise, we would have died.”
PHOTO MUNIR UZ ZAMAN, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
Bangladesh is among the countries most vulnerable to climate change-related disasters.
A low-lying country, Bangladesh (170 million inhabitants) is crossed by hundreds of waterways and a large part of its territory is made up of the deltas of the great Himalayan rivers, the Ganges and the Brahmaputra.
Several tributaries of these two rivers continue to overflow, but forecasts predict that rain will decrease in the coming days.
Access to the flooded districts has been hampered by damage to highways and railways linking the capital Dhaka and Chittagong, the country’s main port city, which has disrupted economic activity.
The floods come just after student-led protests toppled autocratic Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who fled the country by helicopter to neighbouring India on August 5 and a caretaker government is led by Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus.
Crowdfunding for relief efforts
Among the areas worst affected by the storms is Cox’s Bazar, which is home to around a million Rohingya refugees from neighbouring Burma.
Twenty-four people have died in the Indian state of Tripura since Monday, the head of the state’s disaster management agency, Sarat Kumad Das, told AFP.
PHOTO MOHAMMAD PONIR HOSSAIN, REUTERS
People use a rowboat in the flooded streets of Feni.
In Bangladesh, 18 others were killed, according to Kamrul Hasan, secretary of the Ministry of Disaster Management.
“285,000 people are in emergency shelters,” he added, specifying that a total of 4.5 million people had been affected.
With Bangladesh’s interim government only just taking office, many residents are crowdfunding relief efforts, organized by student protesters earlier.
On Friday, crowds thronged Dhaka University to offer cash donations to students who were loading sacks of rice and bundles of mineral water bottles onto vehicles bound for flood-hit areas.
Bangladesh is among the countries most vulnerable to climate change-related disasters. Monsoon rains cause considerable damage every year, but global warming is increasing their scale and frequency.