The office predicted a storm surge of between 1.5 and two meters for the low-lying coastal area.
Yangon, Myanmar:
Myanmar and Bangladesh deployed thousands of volunteers and ordered evacuations from low-lying areas on Thursday as the first cyclone of the year hit the Bay of Bengal.
Cyclone Mocha is expected to make landfall on the Bangladesh-Myanmar border on Sunday, packing winds of up to 145 kilometers (90 miles) per hour, according to the meteorological office.
The office predicted storm surges of between 1.5 and two meters (5-6 feet) for the low-lying coastal area, which is home to huge camps hosting hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees on the Bangladeshi side.
Thar Tin Maung, 60, was evacuated from his village in Myanmar’s Rakhine state to Sittwe city in preparation for the storm.
“As it is located at the entrance of the river, our village cannot resist even a small storm,” he told AFP.
“There will be some people who cannot move out of the village and I am worried about them.”
Ahmadul Haq, director of Bangladesh’s cyclone preparedness programme, said they had deployed 8,600 volunteers in Cox’s Bazar and 3,400 Rohingya volunteers in refugee camps.
“In particular, we are alerting people living on mountain slopes as the cyclone will bring heavy rains, which could lead to landslides,” he told AFP.
Bangladesh also banned fishing boats from going into the deep sea.
Cyclones – the equivalent of hurricanes in the North Atlantic or typhoons in the Pacific Northwest – are a regular and deadly threat along the coast of the northern Indian Ocean where millions of people live.
Bangladesh was last hit by a super storm in November 2007, when Cyclone Sidra ravaged the country’s southwest, killing more than 3,000 people and causing billions of dollars in damage.
In May 2008, Cyclone Nargis left at least 138,000 people dead or missing in Myanmar in the country’s worst natural disaster.