According to the Associated Press, some 2.3 million people were affected by Aila, many of them stranded in flooded villages. Storm surges in Bangladesh flooded agricultural areas with salty water. Home to roughly 25,000 residents, the coastal island Nijhum Dwip was reported to be completely submerged. As of May 27, 2009, many rural villages had not yet been reached by relief workers, and the death toll was expected to rise significantly as search and rescue efforts continued.
"Millions of people have been affected by the cyclone, with half a million in shelters and another half a million forced from their homes or were marooned," a disaster control official told the Reuters news agency in Dhaka, the Bangladeshi capital.
Heavy rain triggered by the storm also raised river levels and burst mud embankments in the Sundarbans delta in West Bengal. The worst affected area in Bangladesh was the Satkhira district, near the port of Mongla, where a local official said 31 bodies were found in one village. "The situation here is alarming," Mohammad Abdus Samad, deputy commissioner of Satkhira, told Reuters.
Diarrhoea has broken out in Cyclone Aila-hit coastal areas of Khulna and Satkhira as an acute scarcity of drinking water and food worsened sufferings of thousands. At least two people died of diarrhoea in Khulna coast yesterday, and over 100 were attacked with the disease in coastal areas of the two districts. The situation might turn alarming unless drinking water is immediately made available, reports quoting locals said. Meanwhile, unofficial estimates said death toll from the cyclone rose to 175 yesterday (Daily Star, May 30, 2009).
"The hurricane crossed the coast at 3:00am early today (Friday) and was now lying over the southern and central parts of Bangladesh as a land depression this morning," a latest meteorological office bulletin said. A total blackout gripped the country after Thursday midnight as all power stations tripped under the impact of the hurricane.
More than 100 people were killed and some 300 went missing in the worst-hit Bagerhat district. Besides, hundreds of people were wounded and thousands of houses flattened in the coastal district, police said.
The Daily Star reorts (Nov. 17, 2007):Death toll may cross 1,000; all communications, utility services snapped; thousands missing; houses, crops, trees destroyed; lakhs homeless. Bangladesh dated with a nightmare as cyclone Sidr ripped through the southwestern coast late Thursday, killing over 700 people and demolishing houses, crops, vegetables and trees alike along its trail of devastation over an area of thousands of square kilometers. Packing winds over 220km an hour, the fierce tropical storm roared across the shoreline after it hit landfall at the Khulna-Barisal coast at 7:30pm Thursday, cutting off all communications and utility services across the country.
“I've never seen anything like this in my 47 years life,” Khalilur Rahman, a government official in Patuakhali, told The Daily Star over telephone last night. “It was a panic beyond description. People found no way but to keep on screaming as long as the cyclone ran rampage here.” One of the fiercest cyclones in the history of the land, the Sidr rode on wailing winds, driving rains and tidal surges to wreak havoc for over 14 hours before moving to Asam and Tripura through the Sylhet border, turning into a well-marked low yesterday (Nov. 16, 2007).Bagerhat's Swarankhola upazila alone reported 200 people missing.
However, the people who are already 'refugees' environmentally, deserve 'obliged subsidies' (not perverse ones) from the international communities. For example, the Sidr-victims of Bangladesh, just after emergency relief, deserve to have houses that usual cyclones cannot destroy. Bangladesh government can at best prepare cyclone shelters, cannot afford to build livable homes for every family. UNHCR's argument “People displaced through environmental degradation will be able to move within their home country” is right. People surely can move from one place to another but they are at risk because sometimes they 'are moved by' both natural and social forces. The people whom we call 'environmental refugees' have been 'persecuted by the environment' and these mostly 'internally displaced peoples' have been driven away or made to flee away by natural, social, economic or the combination of these forces from their homes (Abdus Sattar Molla, November 30, 2007).
In Bagerhat, road communications with all upazilas, including Swarankhola, Mongla and Morelganj, remained disrupted. What happened to the residents in Dublar Char, including thousands of fishermen, could not be known as local administration failed to contact them. A coastguard team from Mongla set out for the offshore island in the morning. One trawler, some passenger- and fishing-boats sank in the Mongla port channel, officials said. A Sundarbans forest official told UNB that the cyclone wreaked havoc in the mangrove forests at the "first hit". "Our offices were damaged, boats capsized or washed away,"
The demonstrators, who said they had received only 1.5 kilograms of rice per head since the cyclone, left the scene at around 1.00pm.
But, when contacted, the deputy commissioner of the district, Altaf Hossain, said there was no scarcity of relief goods and everyone was getting relief goods that were adequate for one’s survival. ‘We sent more supplies to the worse affected areas than the less affected ones, which may have caused resentment among the residents of the latter localities,’ Altaf Hossain told New Age.
An elderly resident of Barguna told New Age by phone that he had information that the supply of relief to many of the affected areas, like Raybhogh and Charakgachhia in Nali union, was still inadequate. He said nearly 1,000 homes and a market were completely washed away in Nali, but the survivors had received only 10kg rice per family in the last 13 days from the local UP chairman.
