Hundreds of coastal villages flooded by a tidal wave, lost crops, uprooted trees and unusable infrastructure: the passage of Cyclone Amphan left scenes of Thursday, May 21 “Incredible devastation” in India and Bangladesh.
The human toll of this cyclone, to date the most powerful of the XXIe century in the Bay of Bengal, remains very uncertain due to the extent of disasters and telecommunications outages. The official balance sheets of the two countries currently show at least 22 dead, but this figure is probably only very fragmented.
Appearing this weekend off the coast of India, Amphan made landfall late Wednesday south of the megalopolis of Calcutta, accompanied by winds around 165 km / h and heavy rain. Over three million people had been evacuated and taken shelter as it approached.
While the winds were raging over the Bangladeshi city of Tala, Shafiqul Islam, a resident, spent three hours sheltered under his bed with his wife and two children, raged with remorse for having made a “Huge mistake” by not going to one of the high pressure shelters. When he finally got out, “The house was destroyed. Most of our neighbors’ houses were destroyed. ”, said the 40-year-old farmer. “We are on the brink of death”.
“A gigantic destruction”
“The cyclone did not kill people here. But it destroyed our livelihoods ”, Bhabotosh Kumar Mondal, an official in the Bangladeshi town of Buri Goalini, where Amphan told AFP. “Left a trail of incredible devastation”.
The cyclone caused a storm surge up to three meters which submerged on part of the coastline and caused heaps of salt water to surge through the villages. “It caused huge destruction. Thousands of trees are uprooted. Dams [qui protègent les villages de basse élévation et les élevages de crevettes, ndlr] have given way in many places, flooding many villages ”said Anwar Hossain Howlader, a senior official in the Bangladeshi province of Khulna.
Across the border in India, the picture is the same and the damage is also widespread. “Cyclone Amphan devastated the coast of West Bengal. Thousands of houses have been torn down, trees uprooted, roads submerged and crops destroyed ”Mamata Banerjee, the state’s chief minister, told the press.
After a night of terror, the 15 million inhabitants of Calcutta woke up to the spectacle of flooded streets, cars filled with water sometimes to the windows and traffic lanes blocked by trees and electric poles fell to the ground.
Winds up to 240 km / h
Cyclone Amphan weakened in the morning to the point of becoming a simple tropical depression, Indian meteorological services said. Amphan reached category 4 out of 5 on the Saffir-Simpson scale on Monday, with winds of 200 to 240 km / h. It is the most powerful cyclone to have been born in the Bay of Bengal since 1999, when a cyclone killed 10,000 people in Odisha.
The countries of the region have learned the lessons of the devastating cyclones of previous decades: they have built thousands of shelters for the population and implemented rapid evacuation policies. The coronavirus pandemic, however, has made their work much more difficult this year. To prevent the spread of the virus, the authorities had called on the displaced to respect physical distance in shelters and to wear masks.
In practice, these precautionary measures have been little respected, noted AFP journalists. “The room is crowded and maintaining physical distance is impossible here. Everything is in the hands of God now ”said Rumki Khatun, a 25-year-old woman who had taken refuge with her five-month-old son in a school in the Bangladeshi town of Dacope.
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