C T Online Desk: Dozens of villages, home to thousands of people who live outside the protection of coastal embankments exposed to the Bay of Bengal, remained flooded with salt water as the sea remained unusually swelled until Wednesday, two days after the cyclonic storm Sitrang devastated Bangladesh’s coast.
Water walls of up to 9 feet, as officially reported, were sent onto land by the cyclic storm, with wind gusts reaching 75kmph, flooding villages located outside coastal embankments along the coast.
Record-shattering extremely heavy rain that went on for more than two days in the worst-case scenario along the coast further complicated the situation, rapidly lifting rivers inland and causing them to flow above their danger marks at nine points till the filing of the report Wednesday evening.
The water could not recede because of the influence of the new moon, residents of these villages told New Age correspondents, standing deep in water that flooded the floors of their houses while staring out the window at their submerged crop fields or fish enclosures.
‘I’m not sure where to begin rebuilding,’ Mohammad Yusuf, a resident of Pangasia village in Dumki upazila, told New Age correspondent in Patuakhali.
A tree had crashed on the roof of Yusuf’s rickety residence, through which salt water flowed without showing any sign of receding.
‘The sea is still very rough and the new moon is holding the water from going back into the ocean,’ said Yusuf.
Yusuf represented the poorest community of people in Bangladesh, who could not find a piece of land to live on the mainland and were pushed to the edge of Bangladesh, where the unending waves of the Bay of Bengal crash year round.
New Age correspondent in Patuakhali reported that at least 50,000 people living in 10 villages in Patuakhali outside the coastal embankments have been in more or less the same situation since Sitrang wreaked havoc on Monday.
Many of these people had taken refuge at cyclone shelters and had had one meal since Monday evening, for they live from hand to mouth.
Amid a worsening economic crisis, the poorest segment of the population is fighting a losing battle because they would have to start from scratch.
‘The people of my area had their last meal in the afternoon when they returned from the cyclone shelter,’ said Gafur Miah, a member of ward number 2 of Badarkhali union parishad.
The government allocated one tonne of rice and Tk 8,000 for the entire union of Badarkhali, said Gafur.
In many areas, people brought all they had to cook a meal for everybody in the village.
Officially, about a million people were directly hit by the cyclone in 19 districts.
So far, the disaster management and relief ministry has given out 475 tonnes of rice, Tk 95 lakh, 19,000 dry food packets, 6,411 cartoon dry cakes, and 7,576 cartoon biscuits.
‘We are gathering a list of the affected to help them in rehabilitation,’ said Mohammad Kamal Hossain, deputy commissioner, Patuakhali.
In an initial estimate, the disaster management and relief ministry said that over 10,000 villages were damaged in the storm and 1,000 fish enclosures.
The official account is likely to be an underestimation.
For an instance, the official death toll from the cyclonic storm remained at nine against the unofficial death toll, compiled by newspapers, nearing 40.
With four new bodies recovered on Wednesday, New Age confirmed 32 deaths from different sources, with four people still missing from a dredger capsize in the Sandwip channel of the Bay of Bengal under Mirsharai of Chattogram.
