Cyclone Mocha toll in Myanmar's Rakhine state at least 41: locals

SITTWE, Myanmar: The death toll in cyclone-hit Myanmar’s Rakhine state rose to at least 41 on Tuesday, local leaders told AFP.

“We can confirm there are 17 deaths,” Karlo, the administrator of Bu Ma village told an AFP reporter at the scene, after Cyclone Mocha struck on Sunday.

The number is on top of a death toll of 24 given to AFP by a village leader in nearby Khaung Doke Kar.

Earlier reports said that tens of thousands of people in major Myanmar port city Sittwe were cut off from contact after cyclone Cyclone Mocha 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, the biggest storm to hit the Bay of Bengal in over a decade.

By late Sunday, the storm had largely passed, sparing the refugee camps housing almost a million Rohingya in Bangladesh, where officials said there had been no deaths.

Communications were still down on Monday with Rakhine’s capital Sittwe, home to around 150,000 people and which bore the brunt of the storm according to cyclone trackers.

The road to Sittwe was littered with trees, pylons and power cables, AFP correspondents said, with vehicles full of rescuers and locals trying to reach the city and their relatives forming queues.

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.

Junta-affiliated media reported that the storm had put hundreds of base stations, which connect mobile phones to networks, out of action in Rakhine state.

The United Nations said communications problems meant it had not yet been able to assess the damage in Rakhine state, which has been ravaged by ethnic conflict for years.

On Bangladesh’s Shah Porir Dwip island, residents began repairing damaged homes, searching through debris and retrieving scattered possessions.

Bangladesh officials said they had evacuated 750,000 people.

In the Rohingya camps, where about a million people live in 190,000 bamboo and tarpaulin shelters, the damage was also minimal, officials said.

In recent years, better forecasting and more effective evacuation planning have dramatically reduced the death toll from such storms.

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.

The then-junta faced international criticism for its response to the disaster. It was accused of blocking emergency aid and initially refusing to grant access to humanitarian workers and supplies.