“VILLAGES ARE FLOODED”
Authorities have raised the danger signal to its highest level.
Hasan, from the disaster management ministry, told AFP, said there were no immediate reports of damages, but said “embankments in several places have been breached or submerged, inundating some coastal areas”.
But in India’s West Bengal, the “cyclone has blown off the roofs of hundreds of houses”, and also “uprooted thousands of mangrove trees and electricity poles”, senior state government minister Bankim Chandra Hazra told AFP.
Electricity was off across large parts of the affected areas.
“Storm surges and rising sea levels have breached a number of embankments,” Hazra added. “Some island villages are flooded.”
At least 800,000 Bangladeshis fled their coastal villages, while more than 150,000 people in India also moved inland from the vast Sundarbans mangrove forest, where the Ganges, Brahmaputra and Meghna rivers meet the sea, government ministers and disaster officials said.
Mallik, the Bangladeshi weather expert, said the vast mangrove forests of the Sundarbans helped dissipate the worst of the storm.
“Like in the past, the Sundarbans acted as a natural shield to the cyclone,” he said.
While scientists say climate change is fuelling more storms, better forecasting and more effective evacuation planning have dramatically reduced the death toll.
