Dhaka, Bangladesh – Ekramul Haque was stunned when his uncle called him late in the evening of August 21 to inform him that floodwaters had inundated his ancestral home in Feni district in southeastern Bangladesh, near the border with India.
At the time, Haque was about 10 kilometres away in the town of Mirsarai in Chattogram district, where he lives with his wife and children.
The next day, it took him 40 minutes to travel by minibus in a deluge to reach his village.
“I rushed back home the next morning in torrential rain. By the time I reached home, the water was up to my knees and had soaked everything,” the 29-year-old said. “I urged my family to accompany me to Mirsarai.”
His parents and an uncle returned to Mirsarai with him.
But as heavy rains continued and reports emerged of floods submerging single-storey houses in his village in Chhagalnaiya Upazila (an upazila is a sub-unit of a district), Haque decided to undertake rescue missions from Friday morning to help other family members and village residents who were stranded.
“I got in touch with some friends from college and formed a team to help. However, I was shocked to find that the road from Mirsarai to Chagalnaiya was completely submerged under chest-deep water, making it completely impassable on Friday,” he said.
Delivery of relief supplies
Haque and his friends initially tried to build a makeshift raft from felled banana trees, but it failed to float due to the currents.
They eventually managed to rent a small boat for three times the usual cost. “The current was very strong and it took the boatman three hours to guide us. When we arrived, almost all the houses were completely under water,” Haque told Al Jazeera.
The region where Haque grew up does not always experience annual monsoon flooding, unlike lower-lying areas of the country.
“I don’t remember ever seeing ankle-deep water in my area during monsoon. My parents mentioned that during the great flood of 1988, the water reached knee-deep. This situation was something I had never experienced,” he added, speaking on the phone as he dropped off aid in Chhagalnaiya.
Floods in central, eastern and southeastern Bangladesh have killed 23 people and affected more than 5.7 million. Around 1.24 million families in 11 districts of the country of 180 million people are stranded, cut off from the rest of the country by flooding caused by incessant monsoon rains and overflowing rivers.
As floodwaters gradually recede, those affected are in urgent need of food, drinking water, medicine and dry clothing. The situation is particularly critical in remote areas such as Haque village, which is not close to the district capital and where blocked roads have severely hampered rescue and relief efforts.
“We have been working tirelessly to bring urgent aid to those who have been stranded over the past few days,” Haque said on Tuesday. “Yesterday we reached a village where people had been without food for 72 hours. Many were seriously ill with diarrhoea and lacked clean water. It was an unprecedented crisis.”
Anti-Indian sentiment
Situated on the world’s largest Ganges-Brahmaputra delta, Bangladesh has a deep connection to water. Its landscape, characterised by rivers and floodplains, is accustomed to annual monsoon floods, particularly in the low-lying districts of the northeast. Residents in these areas are familiar with this cycle and prepare by taking valuables to relatives in areas that are not prone to flooding and by stocking up on food and water ahead of the heavy rains and flooding that occur each monsoon season.
Bangladesh is one of the most climate-vulnerable countries in the world, with around 3.5 million people at risk of river flooding annually, according to a 2015 World Bank Institute analysis.
But this year's flooding took many in the southeast by surprise.
In flood-affected districts such as Feni, Cumilla and Lakshmipur (regions close to the Indian border), many blame India, which they say released water from the Dumbur dam in Tripura state in the middle of last week. India has denied opening the floodgates.
The dam, a low structure about 30 metres high, is located more than 120 kilometres from the border with Bangladesh. It produces electricity for the Bangladeshi power grid and is built on the Gumti River, which joins the Meghna in Bangladesh.
Tripura is also facing severe flooding, with 31 people dead and more than 100,000 residents displaced to refugee camps. Floods and landslides have affected nearly 1.7 million people in India.
Kamrul Hasan Nomani, 41, a resident of Lakshmipur, told Al Jazeera that floodwaters are knee-deep in his house and have damaged much of it.
He believes no amount of rain could have caused the water to reach chest-deep in his village without the dam opening.
For Nomani, like many affected by the floods, the crisis has generated anti-Indian sentiment and many believe that India deliberately opened the dam without warning. “They did it intentionally because their preferred government, led by [former Prime Minister Sheikh] “Hasina has fallen in Bangladesh,” Nomani said.
On August 5, following massive student protests, Hasina’s 15-year rule came to an abrupt end. Hasina, who was widely regarded as New Delhi’s favourite leader in Bangladesh, sought refuge in India. The anti-Indian sentiment that existed while Hasina was prime minister, fuelled by accusations of Indian interference to keep her in power, has intensified since she fled to India.
India cited excessive rainfall as the cause of the flooding, although it acknowledged that a flood-related power outage and communications failure on August 21 prevented it from sending regular river updates to its downstream neighbors in Bangladesh.
Shafiqul Alam, press secretary to Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate who leads Bangladesh's new interim government, told reporters in Dhaka that Pranay Verma, India's high commissioner to Bangladesh, informed the interim government that water from the dam was “automatically released” because of high levels.
Sarder Uday Raihan, executive engineer at the Bangladesh Flood Prediction and Warning Centre, told Al Jazeera that the agency usually receives information about rising water levels in India's rivers twice a day.
“However, this time, India did not share any updates. Without accurate information, it is difficult to give an accurate forecast of floods,” he said, adding that timely warnings could have helped prevent deaths and damage.
Houses and crops destroyed
Mohamad Khalequzzaman, a geology professor at Lock Haven University in the US, told Al Jazeera that the last flood to inundate districts such as Feni, Cumilla and Lakshmipur was in 1988.
“The main cause of this year’s flooding appears to be the unusual rainfall in the region, but several other factors have aggravated the situation,” he said.
It said rainfall from August 20 to Friday ranged from 200 to 493 mm (8 to 19.4 inches), compared with the usual 120 to 360 mm (4.7 to 14.2 inches) in several localities in Tripura and eastern Bangladesh, which it described as unusually “heavy” for that region during the monsoon.
Khalequzzaman added that while the sudden release of water from the dam during an already severe flood period may have contributed to flooding in the Gomati river basin, it is unlikely to have contributed significantly to flooding in Feni town, Sonagazi and Chhagalnaiya Upazilas because they do not fall in the river's catchment area.
He also explained that since the soil in the watershed area is already saturated, most of the rainwater becomes surface runoff, which causes flooding of nearby rivers in the affected districts.
He also noted that unplanned urbanisation over the years has led to a build-up of silt which, along with roads, buildings and embankments, particularly along the Gomati and Muhuri rivers, is preventing flood waters from receding.
In addition, he said, land encroachment by illegal companies using the Gomati and Feni rivers for transportation, for example, has destroyed much of the natural drainage system in those areas.
“The combination of torrential rains, disruptions in river flow in both India and Bangladesh, loss of natural drainage, river bed sedimentation and impediments to surface flow have contributed to the severe flooding,” he said.
In a village in Cumilla that is still flooded, the house of Abdul Matin, a teacher, has been destroyed.
“I have lost everything. My corrugated iron house was washed away. I don’t know how I will cope with the economic devastation caused by the flood,” Matin said.
He does not believe the flooding was caused solely by heavy rains and damage to the natural drainage system. “I hold India responsible for this,” he said. “This was India’s water.”
Ismail Mridha, a 46-year-old farmer from Sonagazi Upazila in Feni, told Al Jazeera that the flood devastated both his house and his farmland. “My house, made of mud and corrugated iron, has been completely destroyed, and the farmland where I grew eggplants and pumpkins has been washed away,” he said.
“I survived the flood, but I’m not sure how I will recover from the financial devastation.”
