28 dead in Bangladesh cyclone, millions without power

“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.

Nearly a million people who were evacuated from low-lying regions have now returned to their homes.

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 324mm 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, officials said.

In recent years, better forecasting and more effective evacuation planning have dramatically reduced the death toll from such storms.

The worst recorded, in 1970, killed hundreds of thousands of people.