DHAKA/BARGUNA, 19 November 2007 — The death toll from the massive cyclone that smashed through impoverished Bangladesh could rise to 10,000 as a large number of storm-hit villages on the coast of the Bay of Bengal were still inaccessible.
Aid agencies said they had not been able to reach many victims and those left homeless were in desperate need of food, water and medicine.
Three days after the disaster, rescue workers were still fighting their way to remote areas where entire villages were flattened by the fury of Cyclone Sidr. The head of the country’s Red Crescent told AFP between 5,000 and 10,000 people were believed to have died in the cyclone.
“The toll has already reached 3,000 confirmed dead,” said M. Abdur Rab, chairman of the Bangladeshi Red Crescent Society, the country’s largest humanitarian organization.
“It may cross 5,000, but it will remain below 10,000,” he added.
Traumatized survivors said they too would soon die unless help arrived.
“I lost six of my family members in the cyclone. I am afraid that the rest three of us will die of hunger. We are without food and water for the last few days,” said a 55-year-old farmer, Sattar Gazi.
“For the corpses, we don’t even have clothes to wrap them in for burial... we are wrapping the bodies in leaves,” he told AFP in a village situated on the Bay of Bengal coast and smashed by a six-meter (20 foot) high tidal wave.
Abdul Zabbar, a 50-year-old teacher, said the situation in the area — already one of the poorest places on earth — was unbearable.
“There is no food and drinking water. The whole village is unlivable. Bodies are still floating in the rivers and paddy fields,” he said, adding the rice harvest — or four months of food — had also been washed away.
Victims told an AFP correspondent who managed to reach this coastal area that they had not seen any aid workers — let alone even seen or heard a plane or helicopter. Officials said the humanitarian situation in coastal districts like Barguna, 200 kilometers south of the capital Dhaka, is the worst in decades.
“I have never seen such a catastrophe in my 20 years as a government administrator,” said district official Harisprasad Pal, adding that millions were living in the open and aid was reaching only a tiny number of people.
The private ATN Bangla television network put the toll at 3,000 confirmed dead. The relief and disaster management ministry earlier put the figure 2,217 and rising. There has also been no word from a string of islands off the coast, which would have suffered the full wrath of Thursday night’s storm.
Aid efforts were being hampered by roads blocked by fallen trees and the sheer scale of the devastation.
“In the remote areas it is slow-going, they are almost chopping trees as they go along,” said Douglas Casson Coutts of the World Food Program, adding that officials were working with the military to organize air drops to the most inaccessible districts.
Assessment teams were also yet to piece together a wider picture of the devastation that is needed to coordinate a major relief effort. Army helicopters were also dropping supplies from the air while five navy ships were distributing food, medicine and relief materials, the government said. “Our estimate is that 900,000 families are affected,” said Red Cross official Shafiquzzaman Rabbani.
In many places, villagers said, the dead were quickly being buried in mass graves. Most of the deaths were caused by the tidal wave, which engulfed coastal villages, as well as flying debris and falling trees that crushed flimsy bamboo and tin homes — all that most people in Bangladesh can afford.
A stunned 25-year-old woman, Jahanara, recounted to AFP how she managed to cling to a tree as the storm ripped away everything around her, including her husband, two sons and mother, and even the clothes on her back.
Experts, meanwhile, said they feared for the wildlife and ecology of the world’s biggest mangrove forest, home to the endangered Royal Bengal tiger.
“The cyclone has inflicted an ecological disaster,” said Shanti Ranjan Das of the government’s livestock department.
Every year, storms batter Bangladesh often killing large numbers of people.
Governments and organizations that pledged to help include the German government, which offered $731,000, the European Union with $2.2 million and the British government with $5 million. France pledged $730,000 in aid, while the Philippines announced it would send a medical team. The Rome-based World Food Program was rushing in food, and the Bangladesh Red Crescent Society was sending thousands of workers to stricken areas. Switzerland has pledged 450,000 Swiss francs ($401,000) and the Netherlands will give one million euros in aid.
The United States plans to send $2 million for relief efforts, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said yesterday.
“The United States is responding in the aftermath of Cyclone Sidr to try to meet the immediate needs of the Bangladeshi people, calling into action a multitude of US government disaster relief agencies and departments,” Rice said.
“We extend our deepest sympathies to the people of Bangladesh following this major natural disaster, and we stand ready to assist further,” she said.
