25 dead, hundreds missing in S.Asia storm
Pastor Dale Morgan
25 dead, hundreds missing in S.Asia storm*
KHEJURI, India, Sept 20 (AFP) Sep 20, 2006
At least 25 people were killed as a violent storm made landfall
Wednesday in India and Bangladesh after whipping up high seas in the Bay
of Bengal where several hundred fishermen were missing.
The storm bore down on the Sunderbans -- a vast expanse of mangrove
forests in eastern India and southern Bangladesh split into two UNESCO
world heritage sites -- after sending trawlers scattering for shelter
overnight on Tuesday.
"The storm razed several villages bringing down hundreds of mud houses
in the Sunderbans and east Midnapore districts," said Kanti Ganguly, the
Sunderbans development minister in India's West Bengal state.
Twenty people were killed, 300 injured and more than 100 fishing
trawlers -- each with at least 10 people on board -- were missing or out
of radio contact, Ganguly said by telephone from the state capital Kolkata.
Thousands of trees, electricity masts and telephone poles were uprooted
as strong winds with speeds of up to 60 kilometres (37 miles) per hour
whipped through the districts, weather official G.C. Deb said.
"We expect rains to continue lashing the area for the next 48 hours,"
Deb said.
Road and rail traffic were thrown into disarray with many trains to the
affected districts cancelled, the Press Trust of India news agency said.
The southern coast of neighbouring Bangladesh and its part of the
Sunderbans were also hit hard.
"We have found dead bodies of four fishermen near Kuakata beach" on the
south coast, said Shamsul Alam, the Red Cross's cyclone preparedness
officer. A fifth body was reported to have been found further along the
coast.
"More than 200 trawlers returned to the shore but still we have so far
58 trawlers with over 600 missing in the storm," said Alam.
The storm had caught the fishermen by surprise and many trawlers could
not make shore, police in Bangladesh said.
Among those missing was the commander of a naval gunboat, the police
chief of Bangladesh's coastal Begerhat district, Mostofa Kamal, said.
He was thought to have fallen from his ship and was feared drowned after
the vessel was caught in the storm and drifted into the Sunderbans
forests that surround the coast.
Two helicopters and coastguard rescue boats had rushed to the scene to
try and find the commander but had been hampered in their search by
continued bad weather, police said.
Red Crescent officials in Bangladesh estimate that every day at least
10,000 fishermen go to the Bay of Bengal to fish from the landing
stations in and around the Sunderbans.
Boarding wooden trawlers, they stay in the sea for seven to 10 days
before returning. During storms, they take shelter among the islands
that dot the bay and sometimes in Indian coastal villages.
Police said a mild warning by the weather department might have led more
fishermen than necessary to defy the rough weather.
"The Met office only gave cautionary signal number two to the fishermen.
As a result, many fishermen did not take the warning seriously," the
police chief of Patuakhali district, Shafiqul Islam, told AFP.
Storms and cyclones which form over the Bay of Bengal in September and
October every year kill hundreds and destroy cattle and crops in
Bangladesh and India's eastern states.
In a super cyclone in 1991, 150,000 people were killed when a 4.8-metre
(16-foot) tide submerged the Bangladesh coast near Chittagong.