Cyclone Mocha made landfall between Cox's Bazar in Bangladesh and Myanmar's Sittwe carrying winds of up to 195 kilometres (120 miles) per hour, 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.
- 'Extensive damage' -
The United Nations said communications problems meant it had not yet been able to assess the damage in Rakhine, which has been ravaged by ethnic conflict for years.
"Early reports suggest the damage is extensive," the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said late on Sunday.
Bangladesh officials said they had evacuated 750,000 people.
Secretary of the disaster management ministry, Kamrul Hasan, told AFP on Monday no one had died in the cyclone.
The damage was also minimal in the Rohingya camps, where about a million people live in 190,000 bamboo and tarpaulin shelters, officials said.
"Although the impact of the cyclone could have been much worse, the refugee camps have been severely affected, leaving thousands desperately needing help," the UN said as it made a urgent appeal for aid.
Jomila Banu, a 20-year-old Rohingya woman from Nayapara refugee camp at Teknaf, said: "The roof of my home has been blown away by the wind, now I am eating rice under the open sky with my children."
Better forecasting and more effective evacuation planning have dramatically reduced the death toll from such storms in recent years.
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.
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.
Climate change makes cyclones more intense, destructive: scientists
Paris (AFP) May 15, 2023 -
Climate change does not make cyclones, such as that battering Bangladesh, more frequent but it does render them more intense and destructive, according to climatologists and weather experts.
These immensely powerful natural phenomena have different labels according to the region they hit, but cyclones, hurricanes and typhoons are all violent tropical storms that can generate 10 times as much energy as the Hiroshima atomic bomb.
They are divided into different categories according to their maximum sustained wind strength and the scale of damage they can potentially inflict.
- Cyclones, hurricanes and typhoons -
"A cyclone is a low-pressure system that forms in the tropics in an area hot enough for it to develop," Emmanuel Cloppet, from French weather office Meteo France, told AFP.
"It is characterised by rain/storm clouds that start rotating and generate intense rains and winds, and a storm surge created by the wind," he added.
These huge weather phenomena -- several hundreds of kilometres (miles) across -- are made more dangerous by their ability to travel huge distances.
Tropical cyclones are categorised according to wind intensity, rising from tropical depression (under 63 kilometres per hour (39 miles per hour)), through tropical storm (63-117 kph) to major hurricane (above that).
They are termed cyclones in the Indian Ocean and South Pacific, hurricanes in the North Atlantic and Northeast Pacific and typhoons in the Northwest Pacific.
Meteorological agencies monitoring them use different scales to categorise them, depending on the oceanic basin in which they occur.
The most well-known scale for measuring their intensity and destructive potential is the five-level Saffir-Simpson wind scale.
- More powerful cyclones -
"The overall number of tropical cyclones per year has not changed globally but climate change has increased the occurrence of the most intense and destructive storms," according to the World Weather Attribution (WWA), a group of climate scientists and climate impact specialists whose goal is to demonstrate reliable links between global heating and certain weather phenomena.
The most violent cyclones -- categories three to five on the Saffir-Simpson scale -- that cause the most destruction have become more frequent, the WWA said.
Climate change caused by human activity influences tropical cyclones in three major ways -- by warming the air and oceans and by triggering a rise in sea levels.
"Tropical cyclones are the most extreme rainfall events on the planet," the WWA said in its publication "Reporting Extreme Weather and Climate Change".
Since the atmosphere is warmer, it can hold more water, so when it rains it pours.
"A rise in air temperature of three degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) can potentially produce a 20-percent increase in the quantity of rain generated by a cyclonic event," said Cloppet.
It is these intense torrential downpours that lead to sometimes fatal floods and mudslides, as was the case of Cyclone Freddy, which killed hundreds of people in Malawi and Mozambique earlier this year.
Climate change is also warming the oceans. This warm water fuels cyclones and gives them their strength.
"Climate change therefore creates the conditions in which more powerful storms can form, intensify rapidly and persist to reach land, while carrying more water," the WWA said.
- Shifting north -
The fierce winds produced by cyclones generate storm surges which can cause coastal flooding.
These storm waves are higher now than in previous decades because of the sea level rise triggered by climate change.
Scientists also expect to see cyclones in places they have not happened before because global heating is expanding the regions where tropical sea water conditions occur.
"It's as if the tropics were spreading," Cloppet said.
"Areas that aren't really affected now could be hit much harder in future."
The WWA agreed: "As ocean waters warm, it is reasonable to speculate that (tropical) storms will shift further away from the Equator."
"A northward shift in cyclones in the western North Pacific, striking East and Southeast Asia, (is) a direct consequence of climate change," it said.
As a result, they could strike in relatively unprepared locations that have not, in the past, had reason to expect them.
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