Tropical Cyclone Sidr Aftermath
The MSNBC reporting: Hundreds killed, missing in Bangladesh storm
DHAKA, Bangladesh – A cyclone that slammed into Bangladesh’s coast with winds up to 155 mph has killed at least 425 people with hundreds more unaccounted for, including 1,000 fishermen, officials and news reports said Friday.
The disaster triggered an international relief effort to help the army-backed interim government cope with helping victims.
“1,000 fishermen remain missing as of last night in Bangladesh,” Elisabeth Byrs, spokeswoman of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, told a news briefing in Geneva. The men were aboard some 150 fishing boats out at sea when the storm moved in.
The storm sped up just prior to landfall, but people had the warning that was lacking in the past. The fishermen apparently were betting on taking a last haul in the concentrations that can occur as fish mass to get out of the way of big storms, and lost. The final death toll will be over a thousand, but that is a vast improvement over the tens or hundreds of thousands that died in the past from these storms.
