Tens of thousands of people in a major Myanmar port city were cut off from contact on Monday after a cyclone tore through the west of the country and neighbouring Bangladesh.
Cyclone Mocha made landfall between Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh and Myanmar’s Sittwe packing winds of up to 195 kilometres (120 miles) per hour, in the biggest storm to hit the Bay of Bengal in over a decade.
By late Sunday the storm had largely passed, sparing refugee camps housing almost a million Rohingya in Bangladesh, where officials said there had been no deaths.
Communications with state capital Sittwe, home to around 150,000 people, which bore the brunt of the storm according to cyclone trackers, were still down on Monday.
Cyclone Mocha is the most powerful storm to hit Bangladesh since Cyclone Sidr, Azizur Rahman, the head of Bangladesh’s Meteorological Department, told AFP.
Sidr hit Bangladesh’s southern coast in November 2007, killing more than 3,000 people and causing billions of dollars in damage.
In recent years, better forecasting and more effective evacuation planning have dramatically reduced the death toll from such storms.
Scientists have warned that storms are becoming more powerful as the world gets warmer because of climate change.
Cyclones — the equivalent of hurricanes in the North Atlantic or typhoons in the Northwest Pacific — are a regular and deadly menace on the coast of the northern Indian Ocean where tens of millions of people live.
Cyclone Nargis devastated Myanmar’s Irrawaddy Delta in 2008, killing at least 138,000 people.