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 and India's weather office said it would weaken as it hit the rugged hills of Myanmar's interior.
Some 400-500 makeshift shelters were damaged in camps housing almost one million Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh's Cox's Bazar but there were no immediate reports of casualties, refugee commissioner Mizanur Rahman told AFP.
In Teknaf in Bangladesh volunteers emerged to remove fallen trees and other obstacles from the roads, an AFP correspondent said.
Disaster official Kamrul Hasan said the cyclone had caused "no major damage" in Bangladesh, adding authorities had evacuated 750,000 people ahead of the storm.
Communications with the port town of Sittwe in Myanmar were largely cut off following the storm, AFP correspondents said.
Streets in the town of around 150,000 people were turned into rivers as the storm surged ashore, tearing roofs from buildings and downing power lines.
- Debris -
The wind ripped apart homes made of tarpaulin and bamboo at one camp for displaced Rohingya at Kyaukphyu in Myanmar's Rakhine state.
Its residents were anxiously watching the rising sea tide, camp leader Khin Shwe told AFP.
"We are now going to check whether sea water is increasing to our place... if the seawater rises, our camp can be flooded," he said.
In Kyauktaw town, around two hours drive inland, residents emerged after the storm into debris-littered streets and began patching up the damage to their properties.
A power pylon had crashed into one house and several buildings had lost their corrugated iron roofs.
I am very scared as I never had such an experience," said Phyu Ma, 51.
"I have never seen such a strong wind... I didn't think this would happen. I thought only Sittwe will be hit."
Thousands left Sittwe on Saturday, packing into trucks, cars and tuk-tuks and heading for higher ground inland as meteorologists warned of a storm surge of up to 3.5 metres (11 feet).
"We are not okay because we didn't bring food and other things to cook," said Maung Win, 57, who spent the night in a shelter in Kyauktaw. "We can only wait to get food from people's donations."
Myanmar's junta released a statement from the national weather office late Sunday noting that Cyclone Mocha had moved north towards Chin state.
It made no mention of damages or casualties.
- 'Major emergency' -
The Myanmar Red Cross Society said it was "preparing for a major emergency response".
In Bangladesh, authorities have banned Rohingya refugees from constructing concrete homes, fearing it may encourage them to settle permanently rather than return to Myanmar, which they fled five years ago following a brutal military crackdown.
The camps are generally slightly inland but most of them are built on hillsides, exposing them to the threat of landslides.
Forecasters expect the cyclone to bring a deluge of rain, which can trigger landslips.
Hundreds of people also fled Bangladesh's Saint Martin's island, a local resort area right in the storm's path, with thousands more moving to cyclone shelters on the coral outcrop.
The storm had uprooted hundreds of trees on the island councillor Noor Ahmed told AFP.
"But we don't have any reports of death. Two persons were injured as they were hit by fallen trees."
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.
Operations were suspended at Bangladesh's largest seaport, Chittagong, with boat transport and fishing also halted.
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.
Scientists have warned that storms are becoming more powerful as the world gets warmer because of climate change.
Tropical cyclones and storm surges: Why they are deadly
Yangon (AFP) May 13, 2023 -
Five facts about tropical cyclones and storm surges ahead of powerful Cyclone Mocha, which is expected to hit Myanmar and Bangladesh on Sunday:
- Tropical cyclones -
Cyclones are low-pressure systems that form over warm tropical waters, with gale force winds near the centre. The winds can extend hundreds of kilometres (miles) from the eye of the storm.
Sucking up vast quantities of water, they often produce torrential rains and flooding resulting in major loss of life and property damage.
They are also known as hurricanes or typhoons, depending on where they originate in the world, when they reach sustained winds of at least 119 kilometres per hour (74 miles per hour).
Tropical cyclones (hurricanes) are the most powerful weather events on Earth, according to NASA.
- Storm surges -
Cyclones can unleash catastrophic storm surges -- tsunami-like flooding -- when they make landfall. They can be the deadliest part of a cyclone and are only partially affected by wind speeds.
The term "storm surge" refers to rising seas whipped up by a storm, creating a wall of water several metres higher than the normal tide level.
The large swells move faster than the cyclone and are sometimes spotted up to 1,000 kilometres ahead of a major storm.
The surge can extend for dozens of kilometres inland, overwhelming homes and making roads impassable.
A storm surge is shaped by a number of different factors, including storm intensity, forward speed, the size of a storm and the angle of approach to the coast.
The underlying features of the land at the coast, including bays and estuaries, are also at play.
In previous storms, people failed to flee because they did not grasp the surge's deadly threat.
That was the case for 2013's Super Typhoon Haiyan, which left 7,350 dead or missing in the central Philippines, primarily due to the surge.
A storm surge of up to three metres (10 feet) is likely to inundate low-lying areas of Myanmar's Rakhine State and eastern Bangladesh, according to the Indian Meteorological Department.
- Low-lying areas -
Bangladesh, a low-lying delta nation, is routinely hit by bad storms between April and December that cause deaths and widespread property damage.
Bangladesh is vulnerable to cyclones due to its location at the triangular-shaped head of the Bay of Bengal, the geography of its coastal area and its high-population density, according to experts.
Hundreds of thousands of people living around the Bay of Bengal have been killed in cyclones in recent decades.
The death tolls have come down in the past few years because of faster evacuations and the building of thousands of coastal shelters.
- Bay of Bengal -
The tropical cyclone season in the Bay of Bengal and neighbouring Arabian Sea has two peaks around May and November, according to the World Meteorological Organization.
The cyclones can form in the western Pacific Ocean and travel in a northwest direction before arriving in the Bay of Bengal.
The Bay of Bengal has conditions favourable to the development of cyclones, including high sea surface temperatures.
Some of the deadliest storms in history have formed in the Bay of Bengal, including one in 1970 that killed half a million people in what is modern-day Bangladesh.
Some 138,000 died in Bangladesh in 1991 in a tidal wave caused by a cyclone.
In 1999 in India's Odisha state, 10,000 people were killed by a cyclone.
In 2007, Cyclone Sidr killed at least 4,000 in southern Bangladesh.
Then in 2008 Cyclone Nargis, which devastated Myanmar's Irrawaddy Delta, killed at least 138,000 people.
- Climate change -
Studies suggest a warming climate could bring more destructive cyclones as there would be extra heat in the oceans and atmosphere, although such systems could also become less frequent.
Rising sea levels could boost storm surges from cyclones, making them even more deadly and destructive.
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