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135 die in Bangladesh monsoons
13/06/2007 19:00 - (SA)
Chittagong - Mudslides, flooding and lightning this week have washed away shanties, inundated cities and killed at least 135 people with about two dozen still missing in Bangladesh's annual monsoons, officials and a domestic news agency said on Wednesday.
The worst-hit area was the hilly port city of Chittagong, where soaked hillsides collapsed onto a shantytown, burying dozens of bamboo and tin shacks.
The death toll in the city increased to 119 on Wednesday after 22 more bodies were found, city official Nur Sulaiman said.
About two dozen people remained missing, officials said.
Five more people, including two babies, were killed overnight when mudslides flattened their hillside shanties in neighbouring Bandarban, a remote hill district bordering Myanmar, the United News of Bangladesh said.
Rescuers recovered their mud-covered bodies from debris on Wednesday.
'Vulnerable' slums
Elsewhere, lightning strikes killed 11 people in the neighbouring districts of Cox's Bazar, Noakhali and Brahmmanbaria, the Food and Disaster Management Ministry said.
The heaviest recorded rainfall levels in seven years also have inundated parts of the capital, Dhaka, and other regions.
Also on Wednesday, the Gumti River breached an embankment in Comilla district, flooding dozens of villages and forcing several thousand to flee their homes, CSB television station reported. The district is located 90km east of the capital.
Bangladesh, a low-lying delta nation of 150 million people, is buffeted by cyclones and floods that kill hundreds each year.
Densely populated and grindingly poor, the country is filled with slums that are particularly vulnerable.
The one hit in Chittagong was home to 700 people, most of them migrant workers and their families who lived in clusters of straw-and-bamboo or mud-and-tin shanties built on the slope of hill, survivors said.
Slippery sludge
Life limped back to normal on Wednesday in Chittagong, a city of about 4 million, 220km southeast of Dhaka, as the rain stopped and the sun reappeared for the first time in three days.
Workers were trying to restore power and water supply that was disrupted because of the rains in the city of four million, 220km south of Dhaka. Several city roads remained covered in slippery sludge, residents said.
Authorities moved hundreds of people in vulnerable areas to shelters in concrete school buildings, rescue officials said.
Government and charity agencies distributed food and water to about 1 000 people left homeless by the calamity, the area's government administrator Mukhlesur Rahman said.
- AP
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