KUAKATA, Bangladesh: At least 16 people died after Cyclone Sitrang slammed into Bangladesh, forcing the evacuation of about a million people from their homes, officials said on Tuesday.
Cyclones -- the equivalent of hurricanes in the Atlantic or typhoons in the Pacific -- are a regular menace but scientists say climate change is likely making them more intense and frequent.
Sitrang made landfall in southern Bangladesh late on Monday but authorities managed to get about a million people to safety before the monster weather system hit.
Around 10 million people were without power in districts along the coast on Tuesday, while schools were shut across much of the country's south.
Government official Jebun Nahar said 16 people died, mostly after they were hit by falling trees, with two killed when their boat sank in squally weather in the Jamuna River in the north.
"We still have not got all the reports of damages," she said. Eight people are missing from a dredging boat that sank during the storm late on Monday night in the Bay of Bengal, near the country's largest industrial park at Mirsarai, regional fire department chief Abdullah Pasha said.
"Strong wind flipped the dredger and it sank instantly in the Bay of Bengal," he said, adding that divers were searching for survivors.
People evacuated from low-lying regions such as remote islands and river banks were moved to thousands of multi-storey cyclone shelters, Disaster Management Ministry secretary Kamrul Ahsan said.
"They spent the night in cyclone shelters. And this morning many are heading back to their homes," he said.
Ahsan said nearly 10,000 homes were either "destroyed or damaged" in the storm and around 1,000 shrimp farms had been washed away in floods.
In some cases police had to cajole villagers who were reluctant to abandon their homes, officials said.
Trees were uprooted as far away as the capital Dhaka, hundreds of kilometres from the storm's centre. Heavy rains lashed much of the country, flooding cities such as Dhaka, Khulna and Barisal -- which took on 324 millimetres of rainfall on Monday.
About 33,000 Rohingya refugees from Myanmar, controversially relocated from the mainland to a storm-prone island in the Bay of Bengal, were ordered to stay indoors but there were no reports of casualties or damage, officials said. -- AFP
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