Bangladesh Cyclone Death Toll Now 1,723
The official death toll from a savage cyclone that wreaked havoc on southwest Bangladesh reached 1,723 Saturday - the deadliest storm to hit the country in a decade.
Military helicopters and ships joined rescue and relief operations and aid workers on the ground struggled to reach victims. Tropical Cyclone Sidr tore apart villages and forced more than a million coastal villagers to evacuate to government shelters.
Millions more are without power.
The latest death figure tallied to 1,723, with 474 deaths reported from worst-hit Barguna district and 385 from neighboring Patuakhali, a military spokesman, Lt. Col. Moyeenullah Chowdhury, told reporters in the capital, Dhaka.
"Cyclones are not new to Bangladesh, but this one definitely was very, very different, because of the wind speed that I saw, of 240 to 285 kilometers (per hour) [approximately 150 to 175 mph]," Vince Edwards of the aid organization Worldvision told CBS News.
The government reports about 280,000 households have been fully or partially destroyed, said Edwards.
Rescuers battled along roads that were washed out or blocked by wind-blown debris to try to get water and food to people stranded by flooding. Some employed the brute force of elephants to help in their efforts.
On Saturday, the army deployed helicopters to deliver supplies to the remotest areas, while navy ships delivered supplies and dispensed medical assistance to migrant fishing communities living on and around hundreds of tiny islands, or shoals, along the coast, the Inter Services Public Relations department said in a statement.
The Ministry of Disaster Management, which has struggled to collect detailed information from the devastated area because of the disruptions to power and communications, put the official death toll Saturday at 932.
"The toll is rising fast, as we receive more information from outlying areas where telephone lines have been restored," said Mokhlesur Rahman, a ministry official in Dhaka, the capital.
At least 270 people died in Patuakhali south of Dhaka, while neighboring Barguna suffered at least 160 deaths, Rahman added.
The United News of Bangladesh news agency, which has reporters deployed across the devastated region, said the count from each affected district left an overall death toll of at least 1,100.
Several international humanitarian organizations, like UNICEF and CARE, were working alongside government and local volunteer agencies to provide safe drinking water and emergency supplies in the affected areas.
"We are hopeful that emergency preparedness in place and quick action has successfully reduced the loss of human life," Suman Islam of CARE Bangladesh said in an e-mailed statement.
"But many people are now homeless, crops and livelihoods have been destroyed and this is going to put great pressure on the government, the economy, and the people themselves," he said.
The 150 mph winds wreaked havoc on the country's electricity and telephone lines, affecting even areas that were spared a direct hit, and leaving the full picture of the death and destruction unclear.
Holmes said his U.N. agency believed that more than 20,000 houses were damaged in the hardest-hit districts, and that the death toll was expected to climb beyond the government's figures.
About 150 fishing trawlers were unaccounted for, he said.
Many parts of Dhaka, the biggest city in this poor, desperately crowded nation of 150 million people, remained without power or water Saturday.
The storm killed at least four people in the capital, which was pounded by strong winds and driving rain Friday.
Hasanul Amin, assistant director of the official cyclone preparedness program and the Bangladesh Red Crescent Society, said about a dozen teams had been deployed to the worst-hit areas in the country's southwest.
But it was slow going. In the village of Sharankhola, some people waited for hours to get dry biscuits and rice, according to Bishnu Prasad, a United News of Bangladesh reporter on the scene.
"We have lost everything," a farmer, Moshararf Hossain, told Prasad. "We have nowhere to go."
Sidr spawned a 4 foot-high storm surge that swept through low-lying areas and some offshore islands, leaving them under water, said Nahid Sultana, an official of the Ministry of Food and Disaster Management.
At least 1.5 million coastal villagers had fled to shelters where they were given emergency rations, said senior government official Ali Imam Majumder in Dhaka.
Many evacuees returned home Saturday to find their straw and bamboo huts had been flattened by the storm. Some sought refuge with neighbors living in brick houses that withstood the storm.
"We survived, but what we need now is help to rebuild our homes," Chand Miah, a resident of Maran Char, a small island in Khulna district, told the Associated Press.
World Vision is putting together seven-day relief packages for families that will include rice, oil, sugar, salt, candles and blankets, according to Vince Edwards, the agency's Bangladesh director.
But Edwards said debris from the storm has blocked roads and rivers, making it difficult to reach all the areas that had been hit.
"There has been lot of damage to houses made of mud and bamboo, and about 60 to 80 percent of the trees have been uprooted," Edwards said.
By late Friday evening, work had resumed at the country's two main seaports - Chittagong and Mongla - as well Chittagong and Dhaka airports, authorities said.
The storm spared India's eastern coast, where the weather was calm. India's Meteorological Department had forecast heavy rain and flooding in West Bengal and Orissa states.
Bangladesh, a low-lying delta nation, is prone to seasonal cyclones and floods that cause huge loss of life and property.
In 1970, between 300,000 and 500,000 people were killed when a cyclone slammed into the Bangladesh coast, and some 140,000 died in 1991.
After the 1991 cyclone, foreign donors and Bangladeshi government agencies began building emergency shelters - concrete boxes raised on pillars, each able to hold anywhere from a few hundred to 3,000 people.
In June, mudslides, flooding and lightning strikes inundated Bangladeshi cities and killed more than 120 people during the country's annual monsoon season.
© 2009 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report. Military helicopters and ships joined rescue and relief operations and aid workers on the ground struggled to reach victims. Tropical Cyclone Sidr tore apart villages and forced more than a million coastal villagers to evacuate to government shelters.
Millions more are without power.
The latest death figure tallied to 1,723, with 474 deaths reported from worst-hit Barguna district and 385 from neighboring Patuakhali, a military spokesman, Lt. Col. Moyeenullah Chowdhury, told reporters in the capital, Dhaka.
"Cyclones are not new to Bangladesh, but this one definitely was very, very different, because of the wind speed that I saw, of 240 to 285 kilometers (per hour) [approximately 150 to 175 mph]," Vince Edwards of the aid organization Worldvision told CBS News.
The government reports about 280,000 households have been fully or partially destroyed, said Edwards.
Rescuers battled along roads that were washed out or blocked by wind-blown debris to try to get water and food to people stranded by flooding. Some employed the brute force of elephants to help in their efforts.
On Saturday, the army deployed helicopters to deliver supplies to the remotest areas, while navy ships delivered supplies and dispensed medical assistance to migrant fishing communities living on and around hundreds of tiny islands, or shoals, along the coast, the Inter Services Public Relations department said in a statement.
The Ministry of Disaster Management, which has struggled to collect detailed information from the devastated area because of the disruptions to power and communications, put the official death toll Saturday at 932.
"The toll is rising fast, as we receive more information from outlying areas where telephone lines have been restored," said Mokhlesur Rahman, a ministry official in Dhaka, the capital.
At least 270 people died in Patuakhali south of Dhaka, while neighboring Barguna suffered at least 160 deaths, Rahman added.
The United News of Bangladesh news agency, which has reporters deployed across the devastated region, said the count from each affected district left an overall death toll of at least 1,100.
The damage to livelihood, housing and crops will be "extremely severe," John Holmes, the U.N. undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs, said Friday, adding that the world body was making millions of dollars in aid available to Bangladesh.
Several international humanitarian organizations, like UNICEF and CARE, were working alongside government and local volunteer agencies to provide safe drinking water and emergency supplies in the affected areas.
"We are hopeful that emergency preparedness in place and quick action has successfully reduced the loss of human life," Suman Islam of CARE Bangladesh said in an e-mailed statement.
"But many people are now homeless, crops and livelihoods have been destroyed and this is going to put great pressure on the government, the economy, and the people themselves," he said.
The 150 mph winds wreaked havoc on the country's electricity and telephone lines, affecting even areas that were spared a direct hit, and leaving the full picture of the death and destruction unclear.
Holmes said his U.N. agency believed that more than 20,000 houses were damaged in the hardest-hit districts, and that the death toll was expected to climb beyond the government's figures.
About 150 fishing trawlers were unaccounted for, he said.
Many parts of Dhaka, the biggest city in this poor, desperately crowded nation of 150 million people, remained without power or water Saturday.
The storm killed at least four people in the capital, which was pounded by strong winds and driving rain Friday.
Hasanul Amin, assistant director of the official cyclone preparedness program and the Bangladesh Red Crescent Society, said about a dozen teams had been deployed to the worst-hit areas in the country's southwest.
But it was slow going. In the village of Sharankhola, some people waited for hours to get dry biscuits and rice, according to Bishnu Prasad, a United News of Bangladesh reporter on the scene.
"We have lost everything," a farmer, Moshararf Hossain, told Prasad. "We have nowhere to go."
Sidr spawned a 4 foot-high storm surge that swept through low-lying areas and some offshore islands, leaving them under water, said Nahid Sultana, an official of the Ministry of Food and Disaster Management.
At least 1.5 million coastal villagers had fled to shelters where they were given emergency rations, said senior government official Ali Imam Majumder in Dhaka.
Many evacuees returned home Saturday to find their straw and bamboo huts had been flattened by the storm. Some sought refuge with neighbors living in brick houses that withstood the storm.
"We survived, but what we need now is help to rebuild our homes," Chand Miah, a resident of Maran Char, a small island in Khulna district, told the Associated Press.
World Vision is putting together seven-day relief packages for families that will include rice, oil, sugar, salt, candles and blankets, according to Vince Edwards, the agency's Bangladesh director.
But Edwards said debris from the storm has blocked roads and rivers, making it difficult to reach all the areas that had been hit.
"There has been lot of damage to houses made of mud and bamboo, and about 60 to 80 percent of the trees have been uprooted," Edwards said.
By late Friday evening, work had resumed at the country's two main seaports - Chittagong and Mongla - as well Chittagong and Dhaka airports, authorities said.
The storm spared India's eastern coast, where the weather was calm. India's Meteorological Department had forecast heavy rain and flooding in West Bengal and Orissa states.
Bangladesh, a low-lying delta nation, is prone to seasonal cyclones and floods that cause huge loss of life and property.
In 1970, between 300,000 and 500,000 people were killed when a cyclone slammed into the Bangladesh coast, and some 140,000 died in 1991.
After the 1991 cyclone, foreign donors and Bangladeshi government agencies began building emergency shelters - concrete boxes raised on pillars, each able to hold anywhere from a few hundred to 3,000 people.
In June, mudslides, flooding and lightning strikes inundated Bangladeshi cities and killed more than 120 people during the country's annual monsoon season.
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The John Warner Defense Authorization Act, which was supported by Clinton, Obama and McCain, permits militarized police round-ups and detention of protesters ("potential terrorists") and other "undesirables" for detention in facilities which are already contracted for and under construction by Kellog, Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton. This Law, which was sold to an "emergency managed" and willfully gullible public in the wake of the 9/11 attacks as a necessary measure needed by our President in order to fight his "global war on terrorism," permits the indefinite detention of American citizens who resists the foreign and domestic agenda of our President. The Journal of Counterterrorism & Homeland Security International reported recently that global engineering and technical services powerhouse, Kellog, Brown & Root announced during January 2006 that its Government and Infrastructure division had been awarded a (no bid) Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity contract to build these detainment camps with a maximum total value of $385 million over a five year term, and that this contract called for the company to build "temporary detention and processing capabilities" to augment existing U.S. government Detention and Removal Operations and to support "the rapid development of new programs." New Programs? Could it possibly get any worse? Why would the president be so concerned about Americans protesting? Aren''t we all happy campers?
Consider the Patriot Act. The Law is 342 pages long, or 57,000 words, making it a bit longer than Dostoevsky''s "Notes from Underground" or, if you''re partial to pigs, about twice the size of Orwell''s "Animal Farm." The Patriot Act is the reigning champion of our government''s recent un-American activities. When it was first paraded before Congress and the Senate following the 9/11 attacks, few Members, other than Congressman, Ron Paul dared to vote against it. Most in Congress simply gave it their rubber-stamp of approval, without ever reading it. Why bother? It was, after all, named the "USA Patriot Act." It must be a good thing. Right? Now in effect, the Law wrecks a generation''s worth of constitutional protections against government snooping, legalizing police-state tactics in searches and seizures, criminalizing certain forms of speech and political activity, and opening the way for the mistreatment of foreigners in government custody and wholesale expulsions and imprisonment. It is a repugnant, unnecessary Law that goes against the very principles its name wrongly implies. Yet, it remains unchecked and unbalanced by public opinion, Lawmakers or the Courts. So, yes, we''re a nation of Laws. But the Laws aren''t much to speak of when they''re designed to hoodwink the public to win its docility. Neither is public responsibility much to speak of these days when its docility is secured with nothing more than a ploy-riddled play on the word "patriot."
While CBS was busy pretending all other news didn''t exist during the California wildfires, our Constitution was burning on the floors of Congress. On Oct 23, the House overwhelmingly passed HR 1955, the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act. This Bill is one of the most blatant attacks against our right to freedom of speech ever devised by Congress. The Bill actually defines different types of thought as "homegrown terrorism," and unlike previous anti-terror legislation, it specifically targets U.S. citizens. The Bill uses extremely vague language to define "terrorist propoganda" as any speech which promotes an agenda that the government considers an "extremist belief system." Since the bill doesn%u2019t specifically define what an "extremist belief system" is, it will be entirely up to the interpretation of government officials. Isn''t that comforting? Considering how much the government has done to desecrate our Constitution lately, they would surely have to define this post as promoting an "extremist belief" system, since it promotes the restoration of civil liberties--something not en vogue these days. As disturbing as this Bill is, so to is the additional requirement that there be a seperate, "public version." In other words, the Bill we see is different from what Congress is seeing. Why''s that necessary? Whatever the reason, I predict this Bill will become Law soon while CBS focuses the country''s attention elsewhere