Floods ravaged vast swaths of the low-lying South Asian country of Bangladesh, forcing some 300,000 Bangladeshis to seek shelter in emergency shelters on Saturday, disaster officials said.
The floods, caused by heavy monsoon rains, have killed at least 42 people in Bangladesh and India since the beginning of this week, many of them in landslides.
“Our house has been completely flooded,” Luhtun Nahar, 60, told AFP at a shelter in Feni, one of the worst-hit districts near the border with Indian state of Tripura.
“Water is on the roof. My brother brought us here in a boat. If he hadn't done that, we would have died.”
The country of 170 million people is crisscrossed by hundreds of rivers and has seen frequent floods in recent decades. Monsoon rains cause widespread damage every year, but climate change is altering weather patterns and increasing the number of extreme events.
The highway and railway between the capital Dhaka and the main port city of Chittagong were damaged, making it difficult to access heavily flooded areas and disrupting business activity.
The floods came just weeks after a student-led revolution toppled the government.
One of the worst-hit areas is Cox's Bazar, home to around one million Rohingya refugees from neighboring Myanmar.
Sarat Kumad Das, from Tripura state's disaster management authority, told AFP that 24 people had been killed on the Indian side of the border since Monday.
Eighteen more people were killed in Bangladesh, according to Disaster Management Ministry Secretary Mohammad Kamul Hasan.
“285,000 people are staying in emergency shelters,” he said, adding that a total of 4.5 million people were affected.
Recovering from chaos
At the time the floods occurred, Bangladesh was recovering from weeks of civil unrest that culminated in the ouster of autocratic former leader Sheikh Hasina on August 5.
With the transitional government led by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus still struggling to get off the ground, ordinary Bangladeshis are crowdfunding relief efforts.
The protests were organised by students who led the protests that led to the ouster of Prime Minister Hasina, who fled Dhaka and remains in India.
Crowds visited Dhaka University on Friday and made cash donations as students loaded cars with bags of rice and crates of bottled water for delivery to flood-hit areas.
Much of Bangladesh is made up of the delta where the mighty Himalayan rivers Ganges and Brahmaputra flow through India and into the sea, and some of their transboundary tributaries still flood.
However, forecasters say the rains are likely to ease over the next few days.
