Floods in Bangladesh have killed at least 38 people and left 4,5-million others displaced or marooned in their homes in north and central Bangladesh, officials said on Wednesday.
People crammed into 600 relief centres or sought higher ground to escape rising water levels, said Shafiqul Islam, a spokesperson for the Food and Disaster Management Ministry.
Major rivers fed by monsoon rains and snowmelt burst their banks, inundating more than half of the country’s 64 districts, he said.
The massive Brahmaputra River was flowing well above the danger level, officials said, adding the Northern Sirajganj and Kurigram districts were the worst hit, with nearly all villages and towns under water.
Television footage showed people perched on rooftops or using banana trees as rafts to escape submerged villages. A shortage of boats hampered efforts to reach about 500 000 people trapped with no access to food or clean water.
The head of Bangladesh’s military-backed emergency government, Fakhruddin Ahmed, and Food and Disaster Management minister Tapan Chowdhury flew to Kurigram district to monitor relief efforts.
Thousands of soldiers, government employees and volunteer workers were deployed to evacuate people and distribute aid supplies.
”The government has mobilised all its essential services and the military for the aid of the flood affected people,” said Chowdhury after arriving back in the capital, Dhaka.
The European Union had donated $2-million to the relief effort, he said.
”According to the weather and flood-forecasting report, we think the flood situation will improve in the next three days. But everything now depends on rainfalls and the river situation in the upstream,” he added.
Last month, landslides triggered by heavy rains killed at least 126 people in the south-eastern city of Chittagong on the Bay of Bengal.
A network of 230 rivers criss-crosses Bangladesh, which suffers annual floods. At least one-fifth of the country is submerged each year. — AFP
