The toll of the cyclone Mocha which swept on Sunday in the Bay of Bengal grew heavier on Monday in Myanmar, where 29 dead have now been recorded, especially around the large port city of Sittwe, with which communications remain difficult.
With winds blowing up to 195 km/h, the biggest storm in more than a decade in the region hit Sunday between Sittwe, the capital of Rakhine state, and Cox’s Bazar in neighboring Bangladesh.
The cyclone caused material damage in the maze of refugee camps where nearly a million Rohingyas live in Bangladesh. No death is however to be deplored in this country, according to the authorities.
But in Myanmar, 24 people died in particular around the village of Khaung Doke Kar northwest of Sittwe, told Agence France-Presse (AFP) the head of a Rohingya camp in the region, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals from the junta. Other residents of this area are missing.
The Myanmar generals in power had meanwhile announced that five people had lost their lives and that 864 houses and 14 hospitals or clinics had been damaged.
Communications with Sittwe, where around 150,000 people live, remained very difficult on Monday.
Hundreds of them who had left to take shelter on the heights returned to this 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 this city and about 25 others were injured there, told AFP Ko Lin Lin, a local rescuer. It was not known if these five deaths were those counted in the balance sheet of the junta.
“In a monastery”
The cyclone reached the shores of Myanmar on Sunday, causing a tidal wave several meters high and strong winds that toppled a communication tower in Sittwe, according to images posted on social networks.
“I was in a Buddhist monastery when the storm arrived”, told one of the inhabitants to AFP, “the prayer room and the refectory of the monks collapsed”.
Junta-linked media reported that hundreds of mobile phone towers were no longer operational.
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 live.
“The first information that goes back suggests that the damage is significant,” said Sunday evening the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
In Bangladesh, where the authorities claimed to have evacuated 750,000 people, Kamrul Hasan, a ministerial official, assured AFP that the cyclone had caused no deaths.
In the Rohingya camps, where around one million refugees live in 190,000 shelters made of bamboo and tarpaulins, the damage is limited.
“Even if the impact of the cyclone could have been much more serious, the refugee camps have been seriously affected and thousands of people are in desperate need of help”, nevertheless alerted the UN, launching an emergency appeal.
Destroyed houses
On the Bangladeshi island of Shapuree, people were busy repairing 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”.
” The cyclone Mocha is the strongest storm to hit Bangladesh since the sidr Azizur Rahman, director of Bangladesh’s meteorology department, told AFP.
In November 2007, the cyclone sidr ravaged the southern coast of Bangladesh, causing the death of more than 3,000 people and causing billions of dollars in damage.
In recent years, improved weather forecasts and more efficient evacuations have drastically reduced the number of people killed in cyclones.
Scientists have warned that cyclones are getting more powerful in some parts of the world due to global warming.