Thousands flee as cyclone barrels towards Bangladesh

PATUAKHALI (AFP) — Tens of thousands of Bangladeshis left their coastal villages Sunday for concrete storm shelters further inland as the low-lying nation prepared for the expected landfall of an intense cyclone, officials said.

Cyclone Remal is set to hit the country and parts of neighboring India on Sunday evening, with Bangladesh’s weather department predicting crashing waves and howling gales with gusts of up to 130 kilometers per hour.

“The cyclone could unleash a storm surge of up to 12 feet (four meters) above normal astronomical tide, which can be dangerous,” senior weather official Muhammad Abul Kalam Mallik told Agence France-Presse (AFP).

Authorities have raised the danger signal to its highest level, warning fishermen against going to the sea and triggering an evacuation order for those in vulnerable areas.

“Our plan is to evacuate hundreds of thousands of people from unsafe and vulnerable homes to the cyclone shelters,” the government’s disaster management secretary Kamrul Hasan told AFP.

The authorities have mobilized tens of thousands of volunteers to alert people to the danger.

He said some 4,000 cyclone shelters have been readied along the country’s lengthy coast on the Bay of Bengal.

The state-run Bangladesh Meteorological Department said Cyclone Remal would make landfall Sunday between 6 p.m. and midnight.