Contact was slowly being restored on Monday with tens of thousands of people cut off in a major Myanmar port city as the death toll from a cyclone that tore through the west of the country and neighbouring Bangladesh rose to at least five.
Cyclone Mocha made landfall between Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh and Myanmar’s Sittwe carrying winds of up to 195 kilometres (120 miles) per hour, the biggest storm to hit the Bay of Bengal in more than a decade.
The storm had largely passed by late Sunday, sparing the refugee camps housing almost a million Rohingya in Bangladesh, where officials said there had been no deaths.
At least five people were killed in Myanmar and “some residents” were injured, the military junta said in a statement, without giving details. More than 860 houses and 14 hospitals or clinics had been damaged across the country, it said.
Communications were still mostly down on Monday with Rakhine state’s capital Sittwe, home to around 150,000 people and which bore the brunt of the storm according to cyclone trackers. Hundreds of people who had sheltered on higher ground were returning to the city along a road littered with trees, pylons and power cables, AFP correspondents said.
A military checkpoint around 10 kilometres (six miles) outside the city barred cars and vans from entering, forcing people to continue their journeys on motorbike or foot.
In Sittwe, power pylons hung low over deserted streets and trees still standing were stripped of leaves. At least five people had died in the city and around 25 had been injured, local rescue worker Ko Lin Lin told AFP.
It was not clear whether any of them were included in the death toll in the junta’s statement I was in a Buddhist monastery when the storm came,” one resident told AFP. The prayer hall and monk dining hall have collapsed. We had to move from this building and that building. Now roads are blocked as trees and pylons are fallen.”
Junta-affiliated media reported that the storm had put hundreds of base stations, which connect mobile phones to networks, out of action in Rakhine.
Junta chief Min Aung Hlaing had “instructed officials to make preparations for Sittwe Airport transport relief”, state media reported, without giving details on when relief was expected to arrive.
The United Nations said communications problems meant it had not yet been able to assess the damage in Rakhine, which has been ravaged by ethnic conflict for years.
Source: eNCA
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