Dhaka: Four missing crew members of a dredger boat were discovered dead by Bangladeshi rescuers on Wednesday, bringing the total number of Cyclone Sitrang fatalities to 28, officials said.
Cyclone Sitrang made landfall in southern Bangladesh on Monday but authorities managed to get about a million people to safety before the monster storm hit, reports AFP.
With winds of 80 kilometres (55 miles) per hour, it still left a trail of devastation in the country’s densely populated, low-lying coastal region, which is home to tens of millions of people, it said.
The government said nearly 10,000 tin-roofed homes were either “destroyed or damaged” and crops on large swathes of farmland were wrecked at a time of record-high food inflation.
“We found one body on Tuesday night and three more this morning. Four crew are still missing,” Abdullah Pasha from the fire department told AFP. Nearly five million people were still without power on Wednesday, Rural Electrification Board official Debashish Chakrabarty told AFP.
Heavy rains lashed much of the country, flooding cities such as Dhaka, Khulna and Barisal — which took on 324 millimetres (13 inches) of rainfall on Monday.
About 33,000 Rohingya refugees from Myanmar, controversially relocated from the mainland to a storm-prone island, were ordered to stay indoors but there were no reports of casualties or damage, the report quoted officials as saying.
