By late Sunday night the storm had largely passed, with about a million Rohingya living in refugee camps.
Kyauktau, Myanmar:
Tens of thousands of people in a major port city of Myanmar were cut off from contact with the country’s west and neighboring Bangladesh on Monday after a cyclone struck.
Cyclone Mocha made landfall between Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh and Sittwe in Myanmar with packing winds of 195 kilometers (120 miles) per hour, the biggest storm to hit the Bay of Bengal in a decade.
By late Sunday night as the storm had largely passed, nearly a million Rohingya were living in refugee camps in Bangladesh, where officials said there had been no deaths.
Communications with the state capital Sittwe, home to some 150,000 people which bore the brunt of the storm according to cyclone trackers, were also down on Monday.
AFP correspondents said the city’s road was littered with trees, pylons and power lines, with rescue workers and vehicles full of locals trying to reach the town and their relatives forming queues.
An ambulance driver trying to reach Sittwe told AFP: “We drove all the way yesterday during the cyclone and cut trees and removed pylons… but then big trees blocked the road.”
He and others were using chainsaws to cut branches of trees that were blocking the road.
According to images published on social media, the storm crashed into the coast on Sunday, triggering a storm surge and strong winds that brought down a communications tower in Sittwe.
Junta-affiliated media reported that the storm had disabled hundreds of base stations in Rakhine state that connect mobile phones to the network.
“I want to go home as soon as possible because we don’t know the situation in Sittwe,” a man in the town told AFP, requesting anonymity.
“There’s no phone line, no internet… I’m worried about my house and belongings.”
State media reported that junta chief Min Aung Hlaing had “instructed officials to prepare for Sittwe Airport to transport relief,” without specifying when the relief was expected to arrive.
‘extensive damage’
The UN said communication problems meant it was not yet able to assess the damage in Rakhine state, which has been ravaged by years of ethnic conflict.
“Initial reports suggest that the damage is widespread,” the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said late Sunday.
Residents on Bangladesh’s Shah Porir Island island began repairing damaged homes, searching through the rubble and retrieving scattered possessions.
Bangladesh officials said they had evacuated 750,000 people.
Kamrul Hasan, secretary of the Ministry of Disaster Management, told AFP on Monday that no one had died due to the cyclone.
Officials said damage was also minimal in the Rohingya camps, where some one million people live in 190,000 bamboo and tarpaulin shelters.
“About 300 shelters were destroyed by the cyclone,” deputy refugee commissioner Shamsud Douza told AFP.
The camps were also less prone to landslides “due to lack of rain”.
“The sky has cleared.”
Cyclone Mocha is the most powerful storm to hit Bangladesh since Cyclone Sidr, Azizur Rahman, head of Bangladesh’s meteorological department, told AFP.
Sidr struck the southern coast of Bangladesh in November 2007, killing over 3,000 people and causing billions of dollars in damage.
In recent years, better forecasts and more effective evacuation planning have dramatically reduced the death toll from such storms.
Scientists have warned that as the world warms due to climate change, storms are becoming more powerful.
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.
Cyclone Nargis devastated Myanmar’s Irrawaddy Delta in 2008, killing at least 138,000 people.
The then rulers faced international criticism for their response to the disaster. It was accused of blocking emergency aid and initially denying access to humanitarian workers and supplies.
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)