Cyclone Mocha Floods Myanmar Port City, Spares Major Refugee Camps
NDTV
Myanmar appears to have borne the direct impact of Cyclone Mocha, as winds of up to 210 kph (130 mph) ripped away tin roofs and brought down a communications tower.
Storm surges whipped up by a powerful cyclone moving inland from the Bay of Bengal inundated the Myanmar port city of Sittwe on Saturday, but largely spared a densely-populated cluster of refugee camps in low-lying neighbouring Bangladesh.
Some 400,000 people were evacuated in Myanmar and Bangladesh ahead of Cyclone Mocha making landfall, as authorities and aid agencies scrambled to avert heavy casualties from one of the strongest storms to hit the region in recent years.
Vulnerable settlements in Cox's Bazar in Bangladesh, where more than one million Rohingya refugees live, were left relatively unscathed by the storm that is now gradually weakening.
"Luckily, we could escape the worst of the cyclone," said Mohammad Shamsud Douza, a Bangladesh government official in charge of refugees. "We are getting some reports of huts damaged but there are no casualties."
