SITTWE, Myanmar: The death toll from Cyclone Mocha which barrelled through the Bay of Bengal rose on Monday (May 15) as contact was slowly restored to western Myanmar, with 29 people reported dead.
Cyclone Mocha made landfall between Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh and Myanmar’s Sittwe carrying winds of up to 195kmh, the biggest storm to hit the Bay of Bengal in more than a decade.
The storm had largely passed by late Sunday, sparing the refugee camps housing almost a million Rohingya in Bangladesh, where officials said there had been no deaths.
Twenty-four people were killed in Khaung Doke Kar village tract northwest of Sittwe, a Rohingya camp leader told AFP, requesting anonymity due to fear of reprisals from the junta.
Several others were feared missing from the low-lying tract, home to Rohingya villages and IDP camps, he said.
AFP footage from the area showed wooden fishing boats smashed to splinters and piled up near the shore.
At least five people were killed in Myanmar and “some residents” were injured, the military junta said in an earlier statement, without giving details.
More than 860 houses and 14 hospitals or clinics had been damaged across the country, it said.
Communications were still patchy on Monday with Rakhine state’s capital Sittwe, home to around 150,000 people and which bore the brunt of the storm according to cyclone trackers.
Hundreds of people who had sheltered on higher ground were returning to the city along a road littered with trees, pylons and power cables, AFP correspondents said.
In Sittwe, power pylons hung low over deserted streets and trees still standing were stripped of leaves.
At least five people had died in the city and around 25 had been injured, local rescue worker Ko Lin Lin told AFP.
It was not clear whether any of them were included in the death toll in the junta’s statement.
Mocha made landfall on Sunday, bringing a storm surge and high winds that toppled a communications tower in Sittwe, according to images published on social media.
“I was in a Buddhist monastery when the storm came,” one resident told AFP.
“The prayer hall and monk dining hall have collapsed. We had to move from this building and that building. Now roads are blocked as trees and pylons are fallen.”
Junta-affiliated media reported that the storm had put hundreds of base stations, which connect mobile phones to networks, out of action in Rakhine.
Source: CNA
