C T Online Desk: At least 28 people have been killed while eight others remain missing after cyclonic storm Sitrang, which weakened into a low on Tuesday, wreaked havoc in Bangladesh with gusty wind and furious rain, officially affecting a million people directly by damaging their houses and properties or submerging crops in 19 districts.
Of the deceased, five were from Bhola, four from Tangail, three from Cumilla, two each from Sirajganj, Gopalganj, Munshiganj, and Cox’s Bazar, and one each from Barguna, Narail, Shariatpur, Dhaka, Noakhali, Patuakhali, Chattogram, and Gazipur.
The eight missing people were sand miners, who are feared dead after their dredger capsized in the Sandwip channel under Mirsharai, Chattogram, on Monday.
At least 16 of the deaths were caused by being crushed under trees, while the rest of the deaths were caused by boat capsize, drowning, road accident and falling overboard, according to reports from the National Disaster Response Coordination Centre, police, district administrations, fire service, and New Age correspondents.
‘We have been able to provide shelter to 10 lakh people in 6,925 cyclone shelters. The cyclone weakened quickly after hitting the coastal districts,’ Enamur Rahman, state minister for disaster management and relief, said while updating journalists on the cyclone’s impacts on Tuesday.
The state minister promised to help the impacted people with relief and rehabilitation support.
The sheltered coastal people returned to their houses on Tuesday to find that the battering wind and furious rain had reduced many of their houses to ruins, trees levelled and crop fields submerged.
The city’s life was severely disrupted by the cyclonic storm, which was packed with wind gusts rising up to 75 km an hour, by the closure of air, road, and waterway operations for up to 24 hours.
The NDRCC estimated that the cyclone damaged 10,132 houses, including 3,228 houses destroyed completely, and directly affected over 8.5 lakh people.
The disaster management and relief ministry confirmed the destruction of 1,000 fish enclosures, while the Department of Agricultural Extension confirmed crop damage on 33,000 hectares, many of which were submerged under water.
The cyclonic storm dumped huge amounts of water across coastal and central Bangladesh since Sunday, submerging villages and even neighbourhoods in towns and cities, including in the capital, as all-time rainfall records were shattered in at least two districts, according to the Met Office and reports by New Age correspondents.
The cyclone dumped so much water that main thoroughfares in the capital, Dhaka, looked like vast water bodies in the wee hours of Tuesday, with out-of-order cars standing in places.
Many roads were filled with water until late Tuesday evening, slowing down traffic and resulting in long tailbacks. Big potholes emerged on many of the roads that were facing development activities after the water receded from them.
Dhaka received 255mm of rain in the 24 hours until 6:00am on Tuesday, the Met Office said, against its all-time high one-day rainfall record of 333mm made on July 28, 2009.
Barishal received 324 mm of rain in the 24 hours until 6:00 am, the highest-ever rainfall recorded in the city since record-keeping began in 1948. The previous record rain of 262mm was set on November 10, 2019.
Madaripur also broke its all-time daily rainfall record of 243 mm, set on June 12, 1995, with 315mm of rain recorded in the 24 hours until 6:00 am on Tuesday.
Over the same period, the Met Office reported, 200mm or above rainfall was recorded at nine stations, followed by 100mm of rain recorded at eight other weather stations.
The Flood Forecasting and Warning Centre said that the Muhuri, Gomti, Manu, Khowai, Surma, and Kushiyara might swell over their danger marks, depending on the rain that could continue inside Bangladesh and upstream across the border under the influence of the remains of Sitrang.
The BMD in its bulletin issued at 6:00pm said that Sitrang had become a low pressure over Assam and the adjoining areas and was likely to move north-northeastward and become gradually unimportant.
In a special weather bulletin issued at 7:00pm, the BMD advised all four maritime ports to lower their signals and fishing boats and trawlers to proceed with caution until this morning.
The fire service, city corporations, and electricity distributors reported massive losses of trees, some of which was a hundred years old, after their grounds gave in to incessant heavy rain, tearing electricity lines and crushing establishments, including houses with their residents inside.
Vast swathes of land were without electricity until Tuesday evening as hundreds of electricity poles were snapped or uprooted and power distributors struggled to remove trees that fell on their intricate distribution network, often zigzagging into remote places.
About eight million people were without power, the state minister for power, energy and mineral resources, Nasrul Hamid, said on Tuesday, adding that six million of the affected electricity consumers were Rural Electrification Board clients.
The affected electricity clients represented about a fifth of the country’s overall electricity users.
REB sources said electricity supply may be restored in many of the affected areas by today, but some areas will have to wait for a while because they are located in remote places – often involving hours of waterway travel.
The areas where the electricity supply was badly affected included Barishal, Patuakhali, Bagerthat, Jashore, Shariatpur and Gopalganj.
The 19 cyclone-affected districts listed by the NDRCC are Khulna, Bagerhat, Satkhira, Barishal, Patuakhali, Bhola, Pirojpur, Barguna, Jhalakathi, Chattogram, Cox’s Bazar, Chandpur, Noakhali, Lakshmipur, Feni, Narail, Gopalganj, Cumilla, and Shariatpur.
In coastal areas, many villages were submerged in seawater after embankments collapsed.
Several thousand people in Bhola and Patuakhali would have to endure years of living in seawater since Sitrang had just expanded the breach that earlier storms had created in some of their embankments.
The Department of Agricultural Extension reported a breach in an embankment in Chattogram that inundated 700 hectares of crop fields at a stretch.
Operations at three airports, including Shah Amanat International Airport in Chattogram, were resumed after 21 hours, reported United News of Bangladesh. The other airports are Cox’s Bazar and Barishal.
The Bangladesh Inland Water Transport Authority also resumed operations at riverine ports at 9:45am, UNB reported.
UNB also reported that Cyclone Sitrang prompted educational institutions to close for an indefinite period as many of them were being used as shelters.
