Myanmar port city slowly reopens after deadly Cyclone Mocha

AFP | Sittwe

The Daily Tribune – www.newsofbahrain.com    

Contact was slowly being restored yesterday with tens of thousands of people cut off in a major Myanmar port city as the death toll from a cyclone that tore through the west of the country and neighbouring Bangladesh rose to at least five.

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.

At least five people were killed in Myanmar and “some residents” were injured, the military junta said in a statement, without giving details.

More than 860 houses and 14 hospitals or clinics had been damaged across the country, it said.

Communications were still mostly down yesterday 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.

A military checkpoint around 10 kilometres (six miles) outside the city barred cars and vans from entering, forcing people to continue their journeys on motorbike or foot.