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Bangladeshi rescuers found the bodies of four missing crew members on a dredger, officials said on Wednesday, bringing the death toll from Cyclone Citron to 28 as millions remain without electricity.
Cyclones – the equivalent of hurricanes in the Atlantic or typhoons in the Pacific – are a common threat in the region, but scientists say climate change could make them more intense and frequent.
Cyclone Citron made landfall in southern Bangladesh on Monday, but authorities managed to keep about a million people safe before the monster storm hit.
With winds of 80 kilometers per hour (55 mph), it still left a devastating trail on the country’s densely populated, low-lying coastal regions, which are home to tens of millions of people.
Nearly 10,000 tin-roofed homes were “destroyed or damaged” and crops were destroyed on swathes of farmland as food inflation hit a record high, the government said.
Fire department divers have found the bodies of four crew members of a dredger during a storm in the Bay of Bengal.
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“We found one body on Tuesday night and three more this morning. Four staff members are still missing,” Abdullah Pasha of the fire department told AFP.
Nearly 5 million people remained without power on Wednesday, Debashish Chakrabarty, an official with the Rural Electrification Commission, told AFP.
Nearly a million people evacuated from low-lying areas have now returned home.
Trees were uprooted as far as Dhaka, the capital, hundreds of kilometers from the center of the storm.
Heavy rain hit much of the country, inundating cities such as Dhaka, Khulna and Barisal – with 324 mm (13 inches) of rain falling on Monday.
About 33,000 Rohingya refugees from Myanmar have been ordered to stay indoors due to their controversial migration from the mainland to a storm-prone island, but there have been no reports of casualties or damage, officials said.
Better forecasts and more effective evacuation plans have dramatically reduced the death toll from such storms in recent years.
The worst on record in 1970 killed hundreds of thousands of people.
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