AFP – Floods triggered by torrential rains have swamped a swath of low-lying Bangladesh, disaster officials said yesterday, adding to the new government’s challenges after weeks of political turmoil.
At least two people have died and hundreds of thousands are stranded in the floods in at least eight districts in southern and eastern areas.
“Around 2.9 million people have been affected and more than 70,000 people have been taken to shelters,” senior official in the Ministry of Disaster Management and Relief Mohammad Nazmul Abedin told AFP.
Long-time premier Sheikh Hasina quit as prime minister this month and fled to India after weeks of deadly student-led protests, ending her 15-year autocratic rule.
The South Asian nation of 170 million people, crisscrossed by hundreds of rivers, has seen frequent floods in recent decades.
It is among the countries most vulnerable to disasters and climate change, according to the Global Climate Risk Index.
The annual monsoon rains cause widespread destruction every year, but climate change is shifting weather patterns and increasing the number of extreme weather events.
The army and the navy have been deployed, with speedboats and helicopters rescuing those stranded by the swollen rivers.
Much of the country is made up of deltas where the Himalayan rivers the Ganges and the Brahmaputra wind towards the sea after coursing through India.
Neighbouring India’s Foreign Ministry rejected accusations it was to blame for the floods, denying it had deliberately released water from an upstream dam.
It said the catchment area had experienced the “heaviest rains of this year over the last few days”, and that the flow of water downstream was due to “automatic releases”.
