THE DEATH TOLL from Cyclone Mocha which barrelled through the Bay of Bengal has risen as contact was slowly restored to western Myanmar, with 29 people reported dead.
Cyclone Mocha made landfall between Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh and Myanmar’s Sittwe carrying winds of up to 195 kilometres per hour, the biggest storm to hit the Bay of Bengal in more than a decade.
The storm had largely passed by late Sunday, sparing the refugee camps housing almost a million Rohingya in Bangladesh, where officials said there had been no deaths.
Twenty four people were killed in Khaung Doke Kar village tract northwest of Sittwe, a Rohingya camp leader told AFP, requesting anonymity due to fear of reprisals from the junta.
Several others were feared missing from the low-lying tract, home to Rohingya villages and IDP camps, he said.
The Bangladeshi city of Cox’s Bazar initially had been in the storm’s predicted path which led to authorities evacuating hundreds of thousands of people before the cyclone veered.
AFP footage from the area showed wooden fishing boats smashed to splinters and piled up near the shore.
At least five people were killed in Myanmar and “some residents” were injured, the military junta said in an earlier statement, without giving details.
More than 4,000 of Sittwe’s 300,000 residents were evacuated to other cities and more than 20,000 people were sheltering in sturdy buildings, said Tin Nyein Oo, a volunteer in shelters in Sittwe.
The strong winds injured more than 700 people in Myanmar, out of the over 20,000 sheltering on the highlands of the town according to a leader of the Rakhine Youths Philanthropic Association in Sittwe.
Seawater raced into more than 10 low-lying districts near the shore as Cyclone Mocha made landfall in Rakhine state on Sunday afternoon, he said. Residents moved to roofs and higher floors while the wind and storm surge prevented immediate rescue.
“After 4.00 pm yesterday, the storm weakened a bit, but the water did not fall back. Most of them sat on the roof and at the high places of their houses the whole night. The wind blew all night,” the rescue group leader said.
At least five people were killed in Myanmar and “some residents” were injured, the military junta said in a statement, without giving details.
More than 860 houses and 14 hospitals or clinics had been damaged across the country, it said.
Water was still about 1.5 metres high in flooded areas this morning but rescues were being made as the wind calmed and the sun rose in the sky. The rescue group leader asked civil society organisations and authorities to send aid and help evacuate residents.
The cyclone was downgraded this morning from its severe status as it was steadily weakening over land, according to the India Meteorological Department.
Communications were still patchy today with Rakhine state’s capital Sittwe, home to around 150,000 people and which bore the brunt of the storm according to cyclone trackers.
Hundreds of people who had sheltered on higher ground were returning to the city along a road littered with trees, pylons and power cables, AFP correspondents said.
In Sittwe, power pylons hung low over deserted streets and trees still standing were stripped of leaves.
At least five people had died in the city and around 25 had been injured, local rescue worker Ko Lin Lin told AFP.
It was not clear whether any of them were included in the death toll in the junta’s statement.
Mocha made landfall on Sunday, bringing a storm surge and high winds that toppled a communications tower in Sittwe, according to images published on social media.
“I was in a Buddhist monastery when the storm came,” one resident told AFP.
“The prayer hall and monk dining hall have collapsed. We had to move from this building and that building. Now roads are blocked as trees and pylons are fallen.”
Junta-affiliated media reported that the storm had put hundreds of base stations, which connect mobile phones to networks, out of action in Rakhine.
The United Nations said communications problems meant it had not yet been able to assess the damage in Rakhine, which has been ravaged by ethnic conflict for years.
UN agencies and aid workers in Bangladesh had pre-positioned tons of dry food and dozens of ambulances in the refugee camps that house more than one million Rohingya Muslims who fled persecution in Myanmar.
“Early reports suggest the damage is extensive,” the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said late on Sunday.
Bangladesh officials said they had evacuated 750,000 people.
Secretary of the disaster management ministry, Kamrul Hasan, told AFP today no one had died in the cyclone.
The damage was also minimal in the Rohingya camps, where about a million people live in 190,000 bamboo and tarpaulin shelters, officials said.
“Although the impact of the cyclone could have been much worse, the refugee camps have been severely affected, leaving thousands desperately needing help,” the UN said as it made a urgent appeal for aid.
Jomila Banu, a 20-year-old Rohingya woman from Nayapara refugee camp at Teknaf, said: “The roof of my home has been blown away by the wind, now I am eating rice under the open sky with my children.”
Charity Concern has said its team has spent the day assessing the damage caused by the cyclone and planning repairs, adding that it damaged nutrition centres, a stabilisation facility for sick children and bamboo shelters in the Rohingya camp at Cox’s Bazar.
“Four of the 11 nutrition centres in the part of the camp which Concern manages including a stabilisation centre for sick children and 74 shelters have been damaged,” MD Iqbal, Concern’s Humanitarian Programme Advisor said.
“We are fortunate that the camp did not bear the full impact of the cyclone as many of the bamboo structures are not designed to withstand winds that strong.”
Better forecasting and more effective evacuation planning have dramatically reduced the death toll from such storms in recent years.
Scientists have warned that storms are becoming more powerful as the world gets warmer because of climate change.
Cyclones – the equivalent of hurricanes in the North Atlantic or typhoons in the Northwest Pacific – are a regular and deadly menace on the coast of the northern Indian Ocean where tens of millions of people live.
Cyclone Nargis devastated Myanmar’s Irrawaddy Delta in 2008, killing at least 138,000 people.
The then-junta faced international criticism for its response to the disaster. It was accused of blocking emergency aid and initially refusing to grant access to humanitarian workers and supplies.
Tropical cyclones, which are called hurricanes or typhoons in other regions, are among the world’s most devastating natural disasters when they hit densely populated coastal areas.
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has said that global warming has caused an increase in the intensity and frequency of extreme weather events.
The world has already warmed by about 1 degree Celsius since pre-industrial times due to human activity, and the UN IPCC has warned that this is likely to pass 1.5C between 2030 and 2052 if the increase continues at the current rate.
It is not only temperature that has changed: there have also been changes in rainfall, declines in snow and ice, and increases in sea-level as the oceans heat up.
© AFP 2023, with reporting from the Press Association
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