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At least 1,300 missing after South Asia storm
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At least 1,300 missing after South Asia storm
At least 1,000 people were missing in southern India yesterday and hundreds of fishermen were unaccounted for in Bangladesh after a severe storm in the Bay of Bengal killed 50 people, officials said. Indian authorities said about 100,000 people were homeless after heavy rains caused flooding in coastal districts of Andhra Pradesh on Monday and Tuesday, with strong winds uprooting thousands of trees and electricity poles.
“Over 1,000 people have been reported missing in the three coastal districts,” Praveen Prakash, a state government official, told Reuters. Most of the victims were either electrocuted or died in house collapses, officials said. In Bangladesh, leaders of the low-lying nation’s fishing community said yesterday they had not heard from about 300 fishermen after the storm triggered high waves and heavy rain along the coast this week.
“We are expecting some of them to come back,” Kabir Ahmed Sawdagar told Reuters from the coastal city of Cox’s Bazar, adding that in the past fishermen reported missing had returned safely weeks after a storm. Storms and cyclones that form in the Bay of Bengal in September and October slam into India’s eastern coast and neighbouring Bangladesh almost annually.
In Andhra Pradesh, electricity was out in about 100 towns and 1,300 villages in the region where rail, air and road traffic has been severely disrupted. Hundreds of trucks and other vehicles were stranded on a key highway linking eastern India with the south of the country and the airport in the port city of Visakhapatnam was closed for the second day as its runway was still partially waterlogged. Flooding had disrupted life in at least 25 towns in the region, officials said.
Storms and cyclones that form in the Bay of Bengal in September and October slam into India’s eastern coast and neighbouring Bangladesh almost every year. In 1977, around 10,000 people were killed when a cyclone lashed Andhra Pradesh. Nineteen years later, some 2,000 people were killed in another cyclone. Yesterday, there was no electricity in about 100 towns and 1,300 villages on Andhra Pradesh’s coast where rail, air and road traffic has been severely disrupted.
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