Monsoon storms in Bangladesh have killed at least 25 people and unleashed devastating floods that left more than 4 million people stranded, officials said yesterday.
Relentless downpours over the past week have inundated vast stretches of the country’s northeast, with troops deployed to evacuate households cut off from neighboring communities.
Schools have been turned into relief shelters to house entire villages inundated in a matter of hours by rivers that burst their banks.
“The whole village went under water by early Friday and we all got stranded,” said Lokman, whose family lives in Companyganj village.
“After waiting whole day on the roof of our home, a neighbor rescued us with a makeshift boat. My mother said she has never seen such floods in her entire life,” the 23-year-old said.
Asma Akter, another woman rescued from the rising waters, said that her family had not been able to eat for two days.
“The water rose so quickly we couldn’t bring any of our things,” she said. “And how can you cook anything when everything is under water?”
Lightning strikes amid the storms have killed at least 21 people across the South Asian nation since Friday afternoon, police officials told reporters.
Among them were three children aged 12 to 14 who were struck by lightning on Friday in the rural town of Nandail, local police chief Mizanur Rahman said.
Another four people were killed when landslides hit their hillside homes in the port city of Chittagong, police inspector Nurul Islam told reporters.
Flooding worsened yesterday after a temporary reprieve from the rains the previous afternoon, Sylhet region head government administrator Mosharraf Hossain said.
“The situation is bad. More than 4 million people have been stranded by flood water,” Hossain said, adding that nearly the entire region was without electricity.
Flooding forced Bangladesh’s third-largest international airport in Sylhet to shut down on Friday.
Forecasters said that floods were set to worsen over the next two days, with heavy rains in Bangladesh and upstream in India’s northeast.
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