A cyclone killed more than 350 people in military-ruled Burma, ripping through Rangoon and the Irrawaddy delta where it flattened at least two towns, officials and state media said on Sunday.
The death toll is likely to climb as the authorities manage to contact outlying islands and villages that felt the full force of Cyclone Nagris, a Category-Three storm packing winds of 190km per hour when it hit early on Saturday.
State television, which was still off air in Rangoon more than 36 hours after Nagris slammed into the city of five million, reported 20 000 homes destroyed on one island alone, a government official in the remote capital, Naypyidaw, said.
The island, Haingyi, is about 200km south-west of Rangoon on the western fringes of the Irrawaddy delta.
Nagris, which had been gathering steam in the Bay of Bengal for several days, devastated Burma’s leafy main city, littering the streets with overturned cars, fallen trees and debris from battered buildings.
”Utter war zone,” one diplomat said in an email to Reuters in Bangkok. ”Trees across all streets. Utility poles down. Hospitals devastated. Clean water scarce.”
Earlier, state media said 19 people had been killed in Yangon and 222 in the delta, where weather forecasters had predicted a storm surge of as much as 3.5m.
Official newspapers in Rangoon said only one in four buildings were left standing in Laputta and Kyaik Lat, two towns deep in the rice-producing delta and accessible mainly by boat. There were no details of casualties.
In Rangoon, many roofs were ripped off even sturdy buildings, suggesting damage would be severe in the shanty towns that sit on the outskirts of the sprawling riverside city of five million.
Foreign aid workers, whose movements are restricted by the ruling military junta, had not managed to reach many impoverished areas to assess the impact.
”I have never seen anything like it,” one retired government worker told Reuters. ”It reminded me of when Hurricane Katrina hit the United States.”
Although the sun was shining by Sunday morning, the former capital was without power and water, and food prices had doubled, with many storeholders unsure of when they would be able to replenish stocks. Most shops had sold out of candles.
An electricity board official said it was impossible to know when the power supply — hit-and-miss at the best of times in one of Asia’s poorest countries — would be restored.
”We still have to clear the mess,” the official, who did not want to be named, said.
United Nations disaster experts said it would be days before the full extent of the damage was known in a country ruled since 1962 by secretive and ruthless military regimes.
Bunkered down in Naypyidaw, the junta’s top brass will almost certainly have avoided the worst of the storm.
The military authorities declared a disaster in five states and state media carried footage of soldiers clearing trees from roads and Prime Minister Thein Sein, a lieutenant-general, meeting people sheltering in a Buddhist pagoda.
”It was a direct hit on a major city,” said Terje Skavdal, regional head of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA).
”The government did warn people to stay inside and that might have had an impact, but the material damage is enormous for sure,” Skavdal said.
The UN had made an offer of assistance but was yet to receive a response from the junta, he added.
It remains to be seen what impact the storm will have on a referendum on an army-drafted Constitution scheduled for May 10.
The charter is part of a ”roadmap to democracy” meant to culminate in multiparty elections in 2010 and end nearly five decades of military rule. The opposition and Western governments say it allows the army to retain too much control.
An official at Rangoon International Airport said all incoming flights had been diverted to the second city of Mandalay, in the middle of the south-east Asian nation, and all departures from Rangoon had been cancelled.
Thai Airways in Bangkok said flights would not resume before Monday.
State media said four vessels sank in Rangoon harbour, and jetties in ports had come loose.
By 9am GMT, Nargis had tracked north-east into northern Thailand, where it was dumping large amounts of rain but with dramatically reduced wind speeds. – Reuters 2008