DPA
Dhaka
Rains and wind gusts were lashing coastal areas of Myanmar and Bangladesh on Sunday as the powerful Cyclone Mocha tore through local communities, according to those tracking the escalating storm.
The Global Disaster Alert and Coordination System (GDACS) put the cyclone on red alert and expects destructive winds of up to 259 kilometres per hour in Myanmar and neighbouring Bangladesh.Mocha had been gaining strength over the Bay of Bengal for days.
"The storm has started since the morning and now it is moving strongly. But it has not yet reached its highest strength,” said Kan Aung, a resident of the Myanmar city of Sittwe and member of a local team covering the situation.
Phone lines and internet connections were down in coastal areas, while trees were being uprooted and small buildings damaged in high winds, the 21-year-old told DPA on Sunday.
Sittwe and large parts of Mynamar’s Rakhine State are calculated to be exactly on the cyclone’s route. It is around 180 kilometres south-east of the city of Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh.
Later on Sunday, local meteorologist Azizur Rahman said the storm seemed to have lost some of its speed in Bangladesh. The risk was now much lower than in neighbouring Myanmar, where the centre of the cyclone had shifted, he said.
More than 10,000 houses were damaged in Bangladesh, according to initial estimates, a local official said on Sunday evening. There was initially no information on damage in Rohingya refugee camps as well as no reports of deaths in the country in connection with the storm on Sunday.
Around 1 million Rohingya refugees from Myanmar live in Cox’s Bazar in makeshift shelters. People were told to stay away from the coast, where violent tidal waves were expected.
About 300,000 people came to cyclone shelters under arrangement by the Bangladeshi government, said Bibhisan Das, an official working with emergency response control room in Cox’s Bazar district.
Dhaka’s Met Office said the low-laying areas of the coastal districts of Cox’s Bazar and adjoining Chattogram and offshore islands are likely to be inundated by a wind-driven tidal surge of nearly 2.5 meters above normal.
Khameni Sikder, a resident of Saint Martin island in the Bay of Bengal, told private broadcaster Channel24 that many trees were uprooted and tin-roofed homes damaged by the gusts.
Many in the region are afraid that Mocha could wreak similar devastation to Cyclone Nargis 15 years ago. On May 2-3, 2008, the tropical storm in Myanmar’s Irrawaddy Delta is estimated to have killed almost 140,000 people.