Storms leave 170 dead in Bangladesh, India

[stu]

By Anis Ahmed

Sat Sep 23, 9:56 AM ET

 

 

 

DHAKA/NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Storms that battered Bangladesh and eastern India have killed more than 170 people and left many missing, navy and coastguard officials said on Saturday.

 

A new cyclone alert was also issued for early Sunday in the Kutch region in Gujarat, and two ports -- one in Mundra and one in Kandla -- have been shut down.

 

"We have alerted the port officials and have asked the labourers on the port, fishermen and hundreds of saltpan workers to move to safer locations," local administrator Dhananjay Dwivedi told Reuters.

 

Strong winds and heavy rain triggered by a storm last week have left around 375,000 people homeless in India and Bangladesh over the past four days.

 

Life across Bangladesh, especially in the capital Dhaka, remained largely paralysed with roads knee-deep high with water, witnesses said.

 

Most of the victims in the eastern coast of India and Bangladesh were fishermen caught in the storm on Tuesday night while fishing in the Bay of Bengal, government officials said.

 

They said more than a dozen navy vessels, other boats and helicopters launched a massive search and rescue operation off the Bangladesh coast on Saturday, as hopes of finding the missing alive faded fast.

 

"The sea is still very rough, hampering rescue efforts," a coastguard official said.

 

"So far nearly 100 bodies have been retrieved from the sea at half a dozen spots," said an official in the badly hit Bangladeshi coastal district of Barguna.

 

Authorities say that while many boats have managed to return to shore, the navy and coastguard are still looking for hundreds of fishermen who remain unaccounted for.

 

Also they were looking for a naval officer missing in the bay after his patrol boat ran aground on an island during Tuesday's storm. Other crews of the grounded boat had been recovered by helicopter.

 

Surviving fishermen said they were caught off guard as weather authorities had failed to warn them of the impending storm. Dhaka's weather office denied this, saying an alert was issued well in advance.

 

In West Bengal, constant rain and flooding have killed around 30 people, and forced 350,000 living mainly in coastal areas from their homes.

 

"People have been killed mostly from houses collapsing, lightning, trees landing on them," said Mriganka Biswas from the state's relief department.

 

"Victims are now living under tarpaulin sheets provided by the government," he said, adding that around 70,000 homes had been destroyed in the state.

 

In Kolkata, police used boats on Friday to rescue hundreds of families stranded in low-lying slums.

 

The storms also killed more than 40 people and left nearly 15,000 homeless in Andhra Pradesh.

 

(Additional reporting by S. Radha Kumar in HYDERABAD; Manas Banerjee in MALDA; and Rupam Jain Nair in AHMEDABAD)