Cyclone Roanu struck the Bangladesh coast
on Saturday killing six people and forcing
hundreds of thousands more to flee their
homes as the storm unleashed strong winds
and heavy downpours.
Authorities took more than 500,000 people
into shelters as the cyclone made landfall
just after noon local time (0600 GMT),
packing winds as strong as 88 kilometres
(54 miles) per hour.
“It has struck the southern coastal areas of
Barisal and Chittagong with a wind speed of
62-88 kilometres per hour,” Omar Faruq, a
government meterological department
official told AFP.
“The landfall began just after noon. It will
take another three-four hours to complete
the landfall,” he added.
Several villages were inundated on the
Banshkhali coast in Chittagong after the
cyclone triggered a five-feet (1.5 metre)
storm surge, the Red Cross’s cyclone
preparedness official Ruhul Amin told AFP.
“Thousands of villagers were forced to flee
their homes after the storm surge flooded
their villages,” he said.
It came after the peripheral wind of the
cyclone struck coastal areas early on
Saturday morning, causing widespread
devastation across the impoverished region.
Six people perished and hundreds of mud-
and-tin houses were damaged in two
southern districts, police said.
“A mother and her young child were killed
after a landslide buried their hillside home
at Sitakundu in Chittagong. The landslide
was caused by heavy rains,” Shah Alam, a
police inspector told AFP, adding that
another child died in the Chittagong city.
Two others were killed in Tajmuddin town
on Bhola island in the coastal region while a
woman in her 50s died under a flattened
house in nearby Patuakhali, police said.
Thousands of homes were being evacuated
as the cyclone bore down.
“So far we have moved more than 500,000
people to cyclone shelters,” Reaz Ahmed, the
head of Bangladesh’s Disaster Management
Department told AFP.
Disaster authorities have shut down sea and
river ports and ordered fishing trawlers not
to go out, while the meteorological
department warned of landslides in
southeastern hill districts.
Officials told AFP Friday night that they
were prepared to move more than two
million people to nearly 4,000 cyclone
shelters in the country’s south.
