Nearly 300,000 Bangladeshis are taking refuge in emergency shelters after floods inundated vast areas of the South Asian country, disaster officials said Saturday.
The floods were triggered by heavy monsoon rains and have killed at least 42 people in Bangladesh and India since the start of the week, many of them in landslides.
“My house is completely flooded,” said Lufton Nahar, 60. AFP from a relief shelter in Feni, one of the worst-hit districts near the border with the Indian state of Tripura.
“The water is coming over our roof. My brother brought us here by boat. If he hadn't, we would have died.”
The nation of 170 million people is crisscrossed by hundreds of rivers and has suffered frequent flooding in recent decades.
Monsoon rains cause widespread destruction every year, but climate change is changing weather patterns and increasing the number of extreme weather events.
Roads and rail lines were damaged between the capital Dhaka and the main port city of Chittagong, hampering access to severely flooded districts and disrupting commercial activity.
The floods also come just weeks after a student-led revolution toppled their government.
Among the worst-affected areas is Cox's Bazar, a district that is home to around a million Rohingya refugees from neighbouring Myanmar.
Tripura state disaster agency official Sarat Kumad Das said: AFP that 24 people had been killed on the Indian side of the border since Monday.
Another 18 people died in Bangladesh, according to Md Kamrul Hasan, secretary of the Ministry of Disaster Management.
“285,000 people are living in emergency shelters,” he said, adding that a total of 4.5 million people have been affected.
Recovering from the riots
When the floods struck, Bangladesh was recovering from weeks of civil unrest that culminated in the ouster of former autocratic leader Sheikh Hasina on August 5.
While an interim government led by Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus is still finding its feet, ordinary Bangladeshis have been collectively raising funds to help.
They were organised by the same students who led the protests that led to the ouster of Hasina, who remains in India after fleeing Dhaka.
A crowd descended on Dhaka University on Friday to offer cash donations as students loaded sacks of rice and boxes of bottled water onto vehicles for areas hit by the deluge.
Much of Bangladesh is made up of deltas where the great Himalayan rivers, the Ganges and the Brahmaputra, meander towards the sea after passing through India.
Several tributaries of the two transnational rivers remained in flood, but forecasts indicated that the rains were likely to ease in the coming days.
