(Sittwe) Contacts are gradually resuming on Monday with the tens of thousands of inhabitants of Sittwe, a major port city in Burma in the Bay of Bengal, cut off from the world the day before after the passage of the cyclone. Mocha which killed at least five people in the country.
With winds blowing up to 195 km/h, the biggest storm in more than a decade in the Bay of Bengal hit Sunday between Sittwe, capital of Rakhine state, and Cox’s Bazar in neighboring Bangladesh.
By late Sunday, the cyclone had largely passed, sparing the maze of refugee camps in Bangladesh where nearly a million Rohingya live. Bangladeshi authorities reported no deaths.
At least five people have been killed in Burma, the country’s ruling junta said in a statement on Monday.
“Some residents were injured” on the passage of Mochasaid the junta, adding that 864 houses and 14 hospitals or clinics had been damaged.
Communications with Sittwe, home to around 150,000 people and which bore the brunt of the storm, according to cyclone tracking sites, remained largely unresolved as of Monday.
Hundreds of people who had left to take shelter on the heights were returning to the city by a road strewn with trees, pylons and electric cables, according to AFP correspondents.
About 10 km from Sittwe, a military checkpoint prohibited access to cars and vans, forcing the population to continue their journey on motorbikes or on foot.
At least five people died in the city and around 25 others were injured, local rescue worker Ko Lin Lin told AFP.
It is unclear whether some of these victims were counted in the junta’s toll.
“In a monastery”
“I was in a Buddhist monastery when the storm arrived,” a resident told AFP, “the prayer hall and the monks’ refectory collapsed.”
“We had to move from one building to another. The roads are now blocked by trees and pylons”.
The cyclone slammed into the Myanmar shoreline on Sunday, causing a meter-long tidal surge and strong winds that toppled a communications tower in Sittwe, according to footage posted on social media.
Media linked to the junta have reported that hundreds of mobile phone masts are no longer operational.
Junta leader Min Aung Hlaing ‘asked officials to prepare the transport of relief supplies to Sittwe airport’, state media reported on Monday, without giving details on when relief supplies would arrive. .
According to the United Nations, communication problems do not yet make it possible to assess the damage in Rakhine State, where most of the Rohingya minority lives.
“The first information that goes back suggests that the damage is significant,” said the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) on Sunday evening.
In Bangladesh, where the authorities claimed to have evacuated 750,000 people, Kamrul Hasan, a ministerial official, told AFP that the cyclone caused no casualties. In the Rohingya camps, where an estimated one million refugees live in 190,000 bamboo and tarpaulin shelters, the damage is minimal.
“Around 300 shelters were destroyed by the cyclone,” deputy refugee commissioner Shamsud Douza told AFP.
Destroyed houses
According to this official, the authorities were now distributing bamboo, tarpaulins and various materials so that the affected Rohingya could rebuild their shelters.
The risks of landslides in the camps are also low “due to scanty rainfall”.
“The sky has become clear. The cyclone Mocha is the strongest storm to hit Bangladesh since Cyclone Sidr,” Azizur Rahman, director of Bangladesh’s meteorology department, told AFP.
On the Bangladeshi island of Shapuree, residents were busy repairing their damaged homes and digging through the rubble to recover goods scattered as Mocha.
“My house was destroyed by the cyclone,” Selim Khan, 27, a Rohingya from Nayapara refugee camp in the town of Teknaf, told AFP.
“I survived because I took refuge in a school with my three children”, he specified, before adding: “I am rebuilding my house”.
In November 2007, sidr ravaged the southern coast of Bangladesh, killing more than 3,000 people and causing billions of dollars in damage.
In recent years, improved weather forecasting and more efficient evacuations have drastically reduced the number of cyclone fatalities.
Scientists have warned that cyclones are getting more powerful in some parts of the world due to global warming.