“VILLAGES ARE FLOODED”
Officials have raised the risk indication to its highest level.
Hasan, from the disaster management department, told AFP, said there were no immediate accounts of injuries, but said “embankments in some areas have been breached or submerged, inundating some maritime locations”.
However, according to senior state government minister Bankim Chandra Hazra, the” storm has blown off the roof of hundreds of houses” and even “uprooted dozens of mangrove branches and power poles” in India’s West Bengal.
Huge portions of the affected regions were without power.
” Storm surges and rising sea levels have breached a number of hillsides”, Hazra added. ” Some area settlements are flooded”.
At least 800, 000 Bangladeshis fled their seaside villages, while more than 150, 000 people in India even moved inland from the great Habitat tidal forest, where the Ganges, Brahmaputra and Meghna streams meet the sea, government ministers and crisis officials said.
The vast mangrove forests of the Sundarbans helped dissipate the worst of the storm, according to Mallik, the Bangladeshi weather expert.
” Like in the past, the Sundarbans acted as a natural shield to the cyclone”, he said.
Although scientists claim that more storms are being caused by climate change, better forecasting and better evacuation planning have significantly decreased the death toll.