Monsoon storms in Bangladesh and India have killed at least 41 people and triggered devastating floods that have left millions more stranded, officials said on Saturday.
Floods are a regular threat to millions of people in low-lying Bangladesh, but experts say climate change is increasing their frequency, ferocity and unpredictability.
Relentless downpours over the past week have swamped much of northeastern Bangladesh and troops have been deployed to evacuate households cut off from neighboring communities.
Schools were turned into shelters to house entire villages that were submerged within hours by rivers that suddenly burst their banks.
“The whole village was flooded early Friday and we are all stranded,” Lokman, whose family lives in the village of Companiganj, told AFP.
“After waiting a whole day on the roof of our house, a neighbor rescued us with a makeshift boat. My mother said she had never seen floods like this in her life,” added the 23-year-old.
Asma Akter, another woman who was rescued from the rising water, said her family had not eaten for two days.
“The water rose so fast that we couldn’t take any of our stuff with us,” she said. “And how can you cook everything when everything is under water?”
Lightning triggered by the storms has killed at least 21 people in the South Asian nation since Friday afternoon, police officials told AFP news agency.
Among them are three children between the ages of 12 and 14 who were struck by lightning in the rural town of Nandail on Friday, local police chief Mizanur Rahman said.
Another four people died when landslides hit their hillside homes in the port city of Chittagong, Police Inspector Nurul Islam told AFP.
At least 16 people have been killed in remote Indian Meghalaya since Thursday, state Premier Conrad Sangma wrote on Twitter after landslides and swelling rivers flooded roads.
Next door in Assam state, more than 1.8 million people have been hit by flooding after five days of non-stop rain.
Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma told reporters he has directed district officials to provide “all necessary assistance and assistance” to those affected by the floods.
People wade on a road in a flooded area after heavy monsoon rains in Sylhet [AFP]
“The situation is bad”
Flooding in Bangladesh worsened on Saturday morning after a temporary respite from earlier afternoon rains, Sylhet region leader Mosharraf Hossain told AFP.
“The situation is bad. More than four million people have been stranded by floods,” Hossain said, adding that almost the entire region was without electricity.
Flooding forced Bangladesh’s third largest international airport in Sylhet to close on Friday.
Forecasters said flooding would worsen over the next two days with heavy rains in Bangladesh and upstream in north-eastern India.
Ahead of this week’s rains, the Sylhet region was still recovering from the worst flooding in nearly two decades late last month, which killed at least 10 people and affected four million others.
Both countries have asked the military for help with the severe flooding, which could get worse as sustained rains are expected over the weekend.
“We expect moderate to heavy rains in several parts of Assam through Sunday. The amount of rainfall was unprecedented,” said Sanjay O’Neil, an official at the meteorological station in Gauhati, the capital of Assam.
In Bangladesh, districts near the Indian border are hardest hit.
Water levels rose in all major rivers across the country, according to the Flood Prediction and Warning Center in Dhaka, the country’s capital. The country has about 130 rivers.
The center said the flooding situation is likely to worsen in the hardest-hit Sunamganj and Sylhet districts in the north-eastern region, as well as Lalmonirhat, Kurigram, Nilphamari and Rangpur districts in northern Bangladesh.