Nearly 300,000 people in Bangladesh have taken refuge in emergency shelters as severe flooding affects large parts of the low-lying South Asian country, disaster officials reported on Saturday.
Triggered by heavy monsoon rains, the floods have claimed the lives of at least 42 people in Bangladesh and India since the beginning of the week. Many of the fatalities were caused by landslides.
“My house is completely inundated,” said Lufton Nahar, 60, speaking from a relief shelter in Feni, one of the hardest-hit districts near the border with India’s Tripura state. “Water is flowing above our roof. My brother brought us here by boat. If he hadn’t, we would have died.”
Bangladesh, a nation of 170 million people, is crisscrossed by hundreds of rivers and has experienced frequent floods in recent decades. Each year, monsoon rains lead to widespread destruction. However, climate change is altering weather patterns and increasing the number of extreme weather events.
The floods have damaged highways and rail lines between the capital, Dhaka, and the main port city of Chittagong. This has made access to severely flooded districts difficult and disrupted business activities.
The flooding comes just weeks after a student-led revolution toppled the government. The interim government, led by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus, is still trying to stabilize the country.
Among the worst-affected areas is Cox’s Bazar, a district that is home to around 1 million Rohingya refugees from neighboring Myanmar.
Sarat Kumad Das, a disaster agency official in India’s Tripura state, said that 24 people had died on the Indian side of the border since Monday. In Bangladesh, 18 people have been confirmed dead, according to Md Kamrul Hasan, the secretary of the Disaster Management Ministry.
“285,000 people are living in emergency shelters,” Hasan stated, adding that a total of 4.5 million people have been affected by the flooding.
Recovering from Unrest
When the floods hit, Bangladesh was still recovering from weeks of civil unrest that ended with the August 5th ouster of the autocratic former leader, Sheikh Hasina. With the interim government still finding its footing, ordinary Bangladeshis have stepped up to help.
The same students who led the protests against Hasina have now organized relief efforts, crowdfunding to gather supplies for those affected by the floods. On Friday, large crowds gathered at Dhaka University to offer cash donations, while students loaded vehicles with sacks of rice and crates of bottled water for the flood-hit areas.
Bangladesh’s geography, consisting mainly of deltas formed by the great Himalayan rivers—the Ganges and the Brahmaputra—makes it especially vulnerable to flooding. Several tributaries of these major rivers are still overflowing, but forecasts suggest that the rain may ease in the coming days.
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