Nearly 139,000 people were killed and thousands more threatened by epidemics, according to official reports, after a devastating cyclone which struck Bangladesh on April 29-30.
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The government estimated that the total cost of the damage could exceed US$3,000 million. Many of the victims were in the south-eastern districts around Chittagong and Cox's Bazar, and unofficial reports indicated that up to 10,000,000 people had been made homeless. Fears of a higher death toll were compounded after reports indicated that up to 4,000,000 people risked death from starvation.
Relief efforts during May were severely hampered by fresh gales on May 6-13 and widespread flooding in the north-east, storms in the coastal district of Barisal on May 20, and heavy rains and floods on May 25-26 around Sylhet in the north-east. Deaths directly attributed to these new disasters totalled some 400, while many hundreds of thousands were left homeless, without food, or without clean drinking water.
On May 1 the Prime Minister Begum Khaleda Zia appealed for international aid, saying that "the magnitude of devastation wrought by the latest cyclone is so great that Bangladesh cannot face it alone".
The cyclone in late April had formed in the Bay of Bengal and brought winds of up to 145 mph. The highest death toll was on the islands of Kutubdia, Maheshkali, Sandwip and Chakori in the south-east. Experts believed that the death toll could have been much higher but for the recently installed early warning system which had allowed time for many people to move to safety or to use the 300 concrete cyclone shelters built under the Cyclone Preparedness Programme, run mainly by the Bangladesh Red Crescent. The Red Crescent's cyclone project director, Emdad Hossain, stressed, however, that up to 5,000 shelters, each at a cost of US$68,000, were required to protect the entire population at risk. The total annual operating budget of the Cyclone Preparedness Programme was under US$136,000.
This article comes from Keesings Worldwide Online
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