Hundreds dead and 500,000 homeless after South Asia cyclone
Pastor Dale Morgan
Hundreds dead and 500,000 homeless after South Asia cyclone*
By MANIK BANERJEE
The Associated Press
Friday, May 29, 2009; 7:56 AM
CALCUTTA, India -- Hundreds of thousands of people flooded out of their
homes by deadly Cyclone Aila crowded government shelters in eastern
India and Bangladesh on Friday, and officials said the risk of disease
outbreaks was growing.
The death toll from Monday's cyclone rose to 264 people in the two
countries.
In India, the cyclone left 500,000 homeless, said B.C. Patra, a senior
official in worst-affected West Bengal state's Emergency Relief
Department. More than 130,000 are crowded in government-run camps, and
relief officials are using aircraft and boats to deliver food, water and
medicine to others sheltering in schools, office buildings or friends'
homes, he said.
Bangladesh's Food and Disaster Management Ministry has stopped
announcing the number of displaced people, but on Friday said several
thousand people were still in shelters.
The ministry put the death toll at 147 in Bangladesh, though media
reports said at least 178 people have died. Most drowned or were washed
away when storm surges hit coastal areas.
The official death toll in India stood at 117, Patra said.
Medical teams fear an outbreak of waterborne diseases such as diarrhea
and typhoid from a lack of clean drinking water.
Many village wells have been submerged by salty water, making them unfit
for drinking, officials said.
The storm also caused devastation in the Sundarbans, a tangle of
mangrove forests that is home to one of the world's largest tiger
populations.
Conservationists have expressed concern over the tigers' fate, though
the extent of damage to their habitat remains unclear.
It is believed that about 250 tigers live on the Indian side of the
Sundarbans and another 250 live on the Bangladeshi side.
___
Associated Press writer Farid Hossain in Dhaka, Bangladesh, contributed
to this report.