Sharjah24 - AFP: Four missing crew members of a dredger boat were discovered dead by Bangladeshi rescuers on Wednesday, bringing the total number of Cyclone Sitrang fatalities to 28, officials said.
Although cyclones, which are the equivalent of hurricanes in the Atlantic and typhoons in the Pacific, are a common threat to the area, scientists believe that climate change is likely making them more violent and common.
On Monday, Cyclone Sitrang made landfall in southern Bangladesh, but authorities were able to evacuate around a million people in advance of the catastrophic storm.
Even with gusts of 80 km/h (55 mph), it left a path of destruction in the low-lying, densely populated coastal portion of the country, which is home to tens of millions of people.
At a period of record-high food inflation, the government said that over 10,000 dwellings with tin roofs were either "devastated or damaged" and that crops on vast stretches of farmland were destroyed.
Four crew members of a dredger boat that drowned in the Bay of Bengal during the storm were found dead by fire department divers.
"On Tuesday night, we discovered one body, and this morning, we discovered three more. Four crew members remain missing "According to AFP, Abdullah Pasha from the fire department.
According to Debashish Chakrabarty, a representative of the Rural Electrification Board, around five million people were still without electricity on Wednesday.
The majority of the nearly one million individuals who were evacuated from low-lying areas have since gone back to live there.
Even in Dhaka, the capital city, hundreds of kilometers from the storm's center, trees were uprooted.
Towns including Dhaka, Khulna, and Barisal were flooded by the country's widespread heavy rains, which also dumped 324 millimeters (13 inches) of rain on those cities on Monday.
The controversial relocation of 33,000 Rohingya refugees from Myanmar from the mainland to an island that is prone to storms was ordered, but there were no reports of casualties or property damage, according to officials.
Better forecasting and more efficient evacuation preparation have significantly decreased the number of fatalities from such storms in recent years.
The deadliest reported event occurred in 1970 and killed thousands of people.
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