Thousands missing, homeless after storm

AT least 800 people remained missing in southern India yesterday and hundreds of fishermen were unaccounted for in Bangladesh after a severe storm in the Bay of Bengal killed 50 people, officials said.

Indian authorities said about 100,000 people were homeless after heavy rains this week caused floods in the coastal districts of Andhra Pradesh state, with strong winds uprooting thousands of trees and electricity poles.

They had earlier said more than 1,000 people were missing in the state, including scores of fishermen, but some of them had returned to shore.

“Of the over 1,000 missing people, 150 to 200 fishermen have been traced and are safe,” top state disaster management official Shashank Goel said.

He said flood waters had started to recede as rains had eased in the region.

Rescue workers in motorised rubber dinghies picked up people stranded in floods, while military helicopters dropped food and water packets to marooned people and lifted them off rooftops. Thousands were evacuated to relief camps.

“Water entered my house around midnight on Monday. We lost everything, including our clothes,” Samba Siva Rao, a coastal resident, said from a relief camp.

Most of the 50 killed in Andhra Pradesh were either electrocuted or died in house collapses, officials said.

In Bangladesh, leaders of the low-lying nation’s fishing community said yesterday they had not heard from about 300 fishermen after the storm triggered high waves and heavy rain along the coast this week.

“We are expecting some of them to come back,” Kabir Ahmed Sawdagar said from the coastal city of Cox’s Bazar, adding that in the past fishermen reported missing had returned safely weeks after a storm.

But Golam Mustafa Chowdhury, president of the Fishing Trawlers Association in the coastal district of Barguna, said 31 trawlers with about 450 fishermen sank during the storm and he feared most of the men on them had drowned.

Other fishing groups said some missing fishermen had returned and others may have been pushed toward Indian waters.

Storms and cyclones that form in the Bay of Bengal in September and October slam into India’s eastern coast and neighbouring Bangladesh almost every year.