Feni. Nearly 300,000 Bangladeshis sought refuge in emergency shelters on Saturday as floods inundated vast areas of the country, emergency officials said.
The floods were the result of heavy monsoon rains, and have claimed at least 42 lives in Bangladesh and India since the start of the week, many of them due to landslides they triggered.
Bangladesh, a country of 170 million people, is crisscrossed by hundreds of rivers and has experienced frequent flooding in recent decades.
“285,000 people are living in emergency shelters,” said Kamrul Hasan, Secretary of the Ministry of Emergency Situations.
The monsoon causes significant damage every year, but climate change is altering weather patterns and increasing the number of extreme weather events.
Roads and railway lines were damaged between the capital Dhaka and the port city of Chittagong, making access to severely flooded districts difficult and disrupting commercial activity.
Among the worst-affected areas is Cox’s Bazar, a district home to nearly a million Rohingya refugees from Burma.
Much of Bangladesh is made up of deltas, where the great Himalayan rivers, the Ganges and the Brahmaputra, flow into the sea after passing through India.
Several tributaries of these two rivers are still overflowing.
According to weather forecasts, the rain is likely to decrease in the coming days.
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– 2024-08-31 09:35:47
