L’India and Bangladesh are affected by heavy monsoon rains which led to floods causing the death of at least 41 people, according to an initial assessment communicated by the authorities. Floods regularly threaten millions of people in low-lying Bangladesh. But, according to experts, climate change is increasing their frequency, severity and suddenness.
Most of the northeast of the country is under water and troops have been deployed to evacuate residents who find themselves isolated. Schools have been turned into emergency shelters to accommodate residents of villages that were flooded within hours following heavy flooding.
“The whole village was under water on Friday morning and we all got stuck,” said Lokman, whose family lives in the village of Companyganj. “After waiting all day on the roof of our house, a neighbor rescued us with a makeshift boat. My mum said she had never seen such flooding in her entire life,” the 23-year-old added. Asma Akter, another woman rescued from the rising waters, said her family could not eat for two days. “The water rose so fast that we couldn’t take any of our things,” she testified.
Lightning and thunderstorms
Accompanying thunderstorms have killed at least 21 people in Bangladesh since Friday afternoon, police officials told Agence France-Presse. Among them, three children aged 12 to 14 were beaten in the town of Nandail on Friday, local police chief Mizanur Rahman said. Four other people were killed in landslides in the port city of Chittagong, police inspector Nurul Islam told Agence France-Presse.
At least 16 people have died since Thursday in India’s northeast state of Meghalaya as landslides and heavy flooding submerged roads, Prime Minister Conrad Sangma said on Twitter. minister of that state. In neighboring Assam state, more than 1.8 million people have been affected by flooding after five days of relentless rain.
Worsening of the floods predicted
The state’s premier, Himanta Biswa Sarma, told reporters that he had asked district officials to provide “all necessary aid and relief” to those affected by the floods. On the flood front, the situation worsened on Saturday morning after a temporary respite from the rainfall on Friday afternoon, Mosharraf Hossain, chief administrator of the government of the Sylhet region, told Agence France-Presse. “The situation is bad. More than four million people have been stranded by the floods,” Mosharraf Hossain said, adding that almost the entire region is without power.
Floods forced Bangladesh’s third international airport, located in Sylhet, to close on Friday. According to the weather forecast, the floods will worsen over the next two days due to heavy rainfall expected in Bangladesh and northeastern India. Before this week’s rains, the Sylhet region was just recovering from the worst flooding it had seen in almost two decades at the end of May. They killed at least ten people and affected four million people.
