The powerful Cyclone Mocha made landfall in western Myanmar on Sunday, killing six people and downing trees, residents said, as aid agencies warned of a severe impact on “hundreds of thousands of vulnerable people.”
The cyclone intensified to a category five storm on Sunday, with wind speeds reaching 220 kilometers per hour (137 mph), according to Myanmar’s Department of Meteorology and Hydrology.
At least six people have been reported dead across Myanmar.
The United Nations and its humanitarian partners said they are preparing an “expanded cyclone response.”
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Myanmar said that before the cyclone, an estimated six million people “already have humanitarian needs” in Myanmar’s western Rakhine state and regions. from Chin, Magway and Sagaing, where Mocha is expected to hit.
“Collectively, these states in the west of the country are home to 1.2 million displaced people, many of whom are fleeing conflict and living in the open without adequate shelter,” OCHA said, warning of “a nightmare scenario.”
Earlier fears that the cyclone could directly hit Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh, where up to a million Rohingya refugees live in squat, crowded camps, failed to materialize, a correspondent for BenarNews, an RFA-affiliated online news outlet, reported.
Mocha missed the town of Cox’s Bazar, but refugee camps in Teknaf, a sub-district and the southernmost city in Bangladesh, and the island of Saint Martin in the Bay of Bengal damaged houses and uprooted trees, the correspondent reported.
Many Rohingya refugee houses in the Teknaf camps were damaged, but there were no reports of landslides as authorities feared, as the cyclone hit Bangladesh at a lower intensity than neighboring Myanmar.
Roxy Mathew Koll, a climatologist at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology in Pune, said Mocha is one of the biggest storms to ever hit the Bay of Bengal.
“It is stronger than Nargis,” Koll told Radio Free Asia, referring to the cyclone that left nearly 140,000 dead and missing in 2008.
Cyclone Mocha formed on Thursday, bringing heavy rain and a coastal surge to Rakhine state from Friday.
“The frequency of cyclones is more or less the same in the Bay of Bengal, but once they form they intensify rapidly,” said the scientist, “This is in response to warmer oceans due to climate change.”
Killed by falling trees
Mocha started crossing the Rakhine coast in southwestern Myanmar on Sunday afternoon.
In the city of Tachileik, in the northeastern Shan state, a married couple was buried in their home in a landslide caused by heavy rain on Sunday morning, according to the Hla Moe Tachilek Welfare Association.
Two people in Rakhine state, a man in the Irrawaddy region and another man in the Mandalay region were killed by falling trees.
In Sittwe, the capital of Rakhine state, a telecommunication tower collapsed due to strong winds and mobile phone signals are not working. Residents have been sharing images of damaged homes and roads on social media.
Winds continued to lash Sittwe until Sunday afternoon and local authorities warned its 150,000 residents to stay indoors.
Hundreds of Sittwe residents were already evacuated to the inner city of Mrauk-U on Saturday.
The Arakan Army, an ethnic Rakhine rebel group, said more than 10,000 people had been relocated from 21 villages on the coast and in low-lying areas of the state since Thursday.
Reported by Abdur Rahman in Cox’s Bazar and Kamran Reza Chowdhury in Dhaka for BenarNews, and by ARF staff. Edited by Paul Eckert.
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