Members of the Indian National Defense Forces rescue residents in Guwahati, a city in the Indian state of Assam.
Xinhua News Agency | Getty Images
Today, Saturday, the authorities said that army forces were called in to rescue thousands of people stranded by massive floods that swept northeastern India and Bangladesh, leaving millions of homes under water and cutting transport lines.
In the Indian state of Assam, at least nine people have died in floods and 2 million people have seen their homes underwater, according to the government’s disaster management agency. Lightning strikes in parts of neighboring Bangladesh have left at least nine people dead since Friday.
Both countries have asked their militaries for help as more floods are looming and rains are expected to continue through the weekend.
In Sylhet in northeastern Bangladesh, on the banks of the Surma River, children sat on the window of a flooded house while other family members gathered on a bed inside their flooded house, some wondering how they would get through the ordeal.
“How do we eat (in this case)?” Anjuman Ara Begum said standing in the water inside her kitchen. “We live on mori (puffy rice), shera (flat rice) and other things people give us. What else can we do? We can’t cook.”
Flights at Osmani International Airport in Sylhet were suspended for three days as floodwaters reached the runway, according to Hafiz Ahmed, the airport manager. The Sylhet Sonamgang highway was also inundated but motorbikes were traveling along the road.
Water levels have risen in all major rivers across the country, according to the Flood Forecasting and Flood Warning Center in the capital, Dhaka. The country has about 130 rivers.
The center said the flood situation is likely to deteriorate in the hardest-hit Sonamganj and Sylhet districts in the northeastern region, as well as in Lalmunirat, Korigram, Nilvamari and Rangpur districts in northern Bangladesh.
The Brahmaputra, one of Asia’s largest, has breached its mud levees, flooding 3,000 villages and farmlands in 28 of Assam’s 33 districts across the border in India.
“We are expecting moderate to heavy rain in several parts of Assam until Sunday. The amount of rainfall was unprecedented,” said Sanjay O’Neill, an official at the meteorological station in Guwahati, the capital of Assam.
Several train services in India have been canceled amid incessant heavy rain for the past five days. In the southern Assam town of Havelong, the railway station was under water and flooded rivers deposited mud and silt along the railway tracks.
The Indian Army has been mobilized to assist disaster response agencies in rescuing stranded people and providing food and other necessities. Soldiers used speedboats and inflatable rafts to navigate the submerged areas.
Last month, flash floods preceding the monsoon, caused by rushing water from upriver in India’s northeastern states, hit northern and northeastern Bangladesh, destroying crops and damaging homes and roads. The country was just beginning to recover when new rains flooded the same areas again this week.
Bangladesh, a country of 160 million people, is low and facing threats from natural disasters such as floods and cyclones, exacerbated by climate change. According to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, about 17% of people in Bangladesh will need to be resettled over the next decade or so if global warming continues at the current rate.
