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  • Cyclone Mocha floods Myanmar port city, sparing major refugee camps

    Cyclone Mocha floods Myanmar port city, sparing major refugee camps

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    DHAKA, May 14 (Reuters) – 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.”

    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.

    Parts of Sittwe, the capital of Rakhine state, were flooded and the ground floors of several buildings were under water, a video posted on social media by a witness in the city showed.

    An ethnic militia that controls swathes of Rakhine said a large number of structures in Sittwe and Kyauktaw had been damaged, and schools and monasteries where people had been sheltering were left without roofs.

    “The whole northern Rakhine has suffered severe damage,” Arakan Army spokesperson Khine Thu Kha said. “People are in trouble.”

    Communication networks in Rakhine had been disrupted after the cyclone made landfall, the U.N. and local media said.

    Across Rakhine state and the north west of the country about 6 million people were already in need of humanitarian assistance, while 1.2 million have been displaced, according to the U.N. humanitarian office (OCHA).

    [1/4] People move from their homes to take shelter in the nearest cyclone shelter at Shah Porir Dwip during the landfall of cyclone Mocha in Teknaf, Bangladesh. REUTERS/Jibon Ahmed

    “For a cyclone to hit an area where there is already such deep humanitarian need is a nightmare scenario, impacting hundreds of thousands of vulnerable people whose coping capacity has been severely eroded by successive crises,” U.N. resident coordinator Ramanathan Balakrishnan said.

    Myanmar has been plunged into chaos since a junta seized power two years ago. After a crackdown on protests, a resistance movement is fighting the military on various fronts.

    A junta spokesperson did not immediately answer a telephone call from Reuters to seek comment.

    FOOD AND SUPPLIES

    In Bangladesh, where authorities moved around 300,000 people to safer areas before the storm hit, Rohingya refugees inside densely-populated camps in the Cox’s Bazar in the south east of the country hunkered down inside their ramshackle homes.

    “Our shelter, made of bamboo and tarpaulin, offers little protection,” said refugee Mohammed Aziz, 21. “We’re praying to Allah to save us.”

    Many of the Rohingya refugees, half-a-million children among them, live in sprawling camps prone to flooding and landslides after having fled a military-led crackdown in Myanmar in 2017.

    Hundreds of thousands of the Muslim Rohingya minority remain in Myanmar’s Rakhine state, where many are confined to camps separated from the rest of the population.

    “The state government has moved many Rohingya from Sittwe camps to higher grounds area,” Zaw Min Tun, a Rohingya resident in Sittwe said, adding that the evacuation took place without any warning.

    “They also didn’t provide any food to them, so people are starving.”

    Ahead of the storm, the World Food Programme said it was preparing food and relief supplies that could help more than 400,000 people in Rakhine and surrounding areas for a month.

    Reporting by Ruma Paul in DHAKA and Reuters staff; Writing by Devjyot Ghoshal; Editing by Clarence Fernandez

    Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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  • Nine dead, more casualties expected after tornadoes rip through U.S. Southeast

    Nine dead, more casualties expected after tornadoes rip through U.S. Southeast

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    ATLANTA, Jan 13 (Reuters) – At least nine people died in tornadoes that destroyed homes and knocked out power to tens of thousands in the U.S. Southeast, local officials said on Friday, and the death toll in hard-hit central Alabama was expected to rise.

    The storms on Thursday stretched from Mississippi to Georgia. At least five tornadoes touched down in central Alabama, according to National Weather Service meteorologist Jessica Laws. One of those twisters potentially tracked about 150 miles (241 km) from southwest Selma, Alabama, to the Georgia-Alabama state line, she said.

    Rescue teams were searching for missing people in Alabama’s Autauga County, where seven deaths have been reported, emergency management director Ernie Baggett said on MSNBC. He credited schools for saving more lives by not releasing students early.

    County coroner Buster Barber told Reuters the number of casualties would rise.

    “We are finding more bodies as we speak,” he said in a phone interview. “We’ve got search teams out in the area.”

    Storms damaged as many as 50 properties in Autauga County, according to the local sheriff’s office.

    In Georgia, Governor Brian Kemp confirmed two people had died in Thursday’s storms. A 5-year-old child was killed after a tree fell on a car, leaving an adult passenger in critical condition as they were driving home, Butts County Coroner Lacey Prue said.

    A state employee also was killed while responding to the storm, Kemp said.

    Images from the severe storms showed widespread damage in Selma, a pivotal site of the U.S. civil rights movement. A tornado tore off rooftops and hurled debris. Multiple businesses and homes were destroyed, and trees were ripped from their roots.

    [1/5] Whole rooms are seen without walls on the second floor of a home the day after a tornado struck Dallas County near Selma, Alabama, U.S. January 13, 2023. Mickey Welsh/USA Today Network via REUTERS

    Residents were visibly shaken by the experience, and some counted themselves lucky to be alive.

    One woman began to cry as she described riding out the storm in her bathtub. She said the winds picked up her trailer, destroying everything inside.

    Ray Hogg said he found shelter inside a country club.

    “You could hear the roar, glass going everywhere,” he said. “You could hear the roof literally being torn off right over our heads.”

    Officials confirmed four tornadoes touched down in Georgia, largely southeast of Atlanta but causing damage across the state, with winds peeling off roofs, knocking down houses and uprooting trees.

    Just southeast of Atlanta, a freight train had three of its cars blown off the tracks, blocking traffic. No injuries from that incident were reported, officials said.

    Alabama Governor Kay Ivey on Thursday declared a state of emergency for the six counties of Autauga, Chambers, Coosa, Dallas, Elmore and Tallapoosa.

    Nearly 20,000 customers were without power in Alabama on Friday, according to PowerOutage.us. The storm also led to power outages in neighboring states of Mississippi and Georgia.

    Tornado sirens in Monroe County in northeast Mississippi, where a twister made landfall, failed to activate as the storm moved through the area, local news reported.

    Reporting by Tyler Clifford in New York and Rich McKay in Atlanta
    Editing by Colleen Jenkins, Matthew Lewis and Josie Kao

    Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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  • Biden, Florida’s DeSantis work ‘hand-in-glove’ on Hurricane Ian recovery

    Biden, Florida’s DeSantis work ‘hand-in-glove’ on Hurricane Ian recovery

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    FORT MYERS, Fla., Oct 5 (Reuters) – U.S. President Joe Biden met with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on Wednesday to assess the devastation from Hurricane Ian, and stressed the need for a united federal and state effort for the lengthy recovery ahead.

    Biden, a Democrat, and DeSantis, his potential 2024 Republican presidential rival, have clashed over multiple issues including COVID-19 vaccines, abortion and LGBT rights.

    They largely set those differences aside during the visit to hard-hit Fort Myers as Biden pledged federal support for a cleanup and rebuilding effort that could cost taxpayers billions of dollars and take years to complete.

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    Biden and DeSantis greeted each other warmly and stood shoulder to shoulder as they met with victims of the hurricane.

    “Mr. President, welcome to Florida. We appreciate working together across various levels of government,” DeSantis, often a blistering critic of the president, told Biden during remarks after the tour.

    “We’re in this together,” said Biden, who referred to DeSantis as ‘Guv,’ and complimented the “good job” the governor had done. “We’ve worked hand-in-glove. We have very different political philosophies.”

    More than 100 people died and nearly 400,000 homes and businesses remained without power in Florida on Tuesday, five days after Hurricane Ian crashed across the state.

    Biden opened his remarks by saying the storm showed climate change was real and needed to be addressed, something some in DeSantis’s Republican party have denied. “I think the one thing this has finally ended is a discussion about whether or not there’s climate change and we should do something about it,” he said.

    Climate change is making hurricanes wetter, windier and altogether more intense, experts say.

    The president also stressed the amount of federal help Florida receive for storm aid and as part of Democrat-backed spending, including $13 billion over the next five years for highways and bridges.

    “The key here is building back better and stronger to withstand the next storm. We can’t build back to what it was before. You got to build back better, because we know more is coming,” he said.

    Biden and his wife, Jill, arrived in Fort Meyers early Wednesday afternoon, two days after visiting Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory battered by Hurricane Fiona last month.

    A U.S. flag hangs in a gangway between affected buildings after Hurricane Ian caused widespread destruction in Fort Myers Beach, Florida, U.S., October 4, 2022. REUTERS/Marco Bello

    Biden got an aerial view of the destruction during a helicopter flight and called the destruction “horrific.”

    BILLIONS OF DOLLARS, INSURANCE QUESTIONS

    Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator Deanne Criswell said it would cost the federal government billions of dollars to repair the damage from the storm.

    “We are still very much in the lifesaving and stabilization mode. They are just beginning the assessments of what the actual extent of damages to the infrastructure. It’s going to be in the billions,” Criswell told reporters on Air Force One.

    Biden and Criswell also suggested Wednesday that Florida’s insurance industry, which faces tens of billions of dollars in losses for the storm, could come under increasing scrutiny.

    “The fact of the matter is, states like Florida, where they’ve had a lot of natural disasters because of flooding and hurricanes and the like – the insurance industry is being very stretched,” Biden said. “We’re going to have to have a hard look at whether or not the insurance industry can be sustained.”

    Fort Myers Mayor Ray Murphy, who also manages commercial real estate, told Reuters he and Biden were having a friendly chat and “trying to encourage each other” in a colorful exchange picked up by a microphone.

    “No one fucks with a Biden,” the president told Murphy, to which the mayor replied: “You’re goddamn right … That’s exactly right.”

    Murphy, elected on a nonpartisan basis, said there was no mention of DeSantis in the brief conversation.

    Biden visited Florida in July after a condominium complex collapsed and killed nearly 100 people, and stressed cooperation with DeSantis at the time.

    But before Hurricane Ian hit, Biden had planned a rally in the political battleground state where Democratic officials expected the president to attack the governor.

    On climate change, Biden has made reducing carbon emissions a focus of his presidency, while DeSantis backed funding to harden Florida’s defenses against flooding but also opposed some previous disaster-relief aid and pushed pension funds not to consider environmental impact when they invest.

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    Additional reporting by Doina Chiacu and Andrea Shalal; Writing by Jeff Mason and Trevor Hunnicutt; Editing by Heather Timmons, Aurora Ellis and Lincoln Feast

    Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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  • Canadians clean up after Fiona sweeps homes out to sea; one dead

    Canadians clean up after Fiona sweeps homes out to sea; one dead

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    PORT AUX BASQUES, Newfoundland, Sept 25 (Reuters) – It will take several months for Canada to restore critical infrastructure after the powerful storm Fiona left an “unprecedented” trail of destruction, officials said on Sunday, as crews fanned out in five provinces to restore power and clean up fallen trees and debris.

    One 73-year-old woman died during the storm in Port aux Basques, one of the hardest hit towns on the southwest tip of Newfoundland with just over 4,000 residents, police said.

    “The woman was last seen inside (her) residence just moments before a wave struck the home, tearing away a portion of the basement,” police said earlier. The coast guard and local rescuers recovered her body from the ocean on Sunday afternoon, according to a statement.

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    Port aux Basques is “like a complete war zone,” said Brian Button, mayor of Port aux Basques. More than 20 homes were destroyed and more than 200 people need shelter. The cost of damages “is in the millions (of dollars) here now,” Button said in an interview.

    “We’re going to be months rebuilding. I think months is a conservative estimate for some of these people,” Rosalyn Roy, a resident of Port aux Basques, told the Canadian Broadcasting Corp.

    Fiona slammed into eastern Canada on Saturday, forcing evacuations as wind gusts reached up to 170 km per hour (106 miles per hour) and the storm surge swallowed up homes on the coastline.

    While the full scale of Fiona’s devastation is not immediately clear, the storm could prove to be one of Canada’s costliest natural disasters.

    Scientists have not yet determined whether climate change influenced Fiona, but in general the warming of the planet is making hurricanes wetter, windier and altogether more intense.

    Canada’s federal government is sending in the armed forces on Sunday to help clear fallen trees and debris, which will in turn open the way for crews to restore power, Emergency Preparedness Minister Bill Blair told Reuters.

    The province of Nova Scotia requested the troops and machinery to clear debris Saturday, “and we said yes, and so they’re being deployed today,” Blair said.

    On Sunday, Prince Edward Island (PEI) and Newfoundland and Labrador also requested federal support and troops are going to be sent, Blair said. About 100 troops are heading to each of the three provinces, Defense Minister Anita Anand told reporters.

    RCMP officers observe the destruction after the arrival of Hurricane Fiona in Port Aux Basques, Newfoundland, Canada September 25, 2022. REUTERS/John Morris

    The Canadian Hurricane Centre estimated that Fiona was the lowest-pressured storm to make landfall on record in Canada.

    In 2019, Dorian hit the region around Halifax, Nova Scotia, blowing down a construction crane and knocking out power. Fiona, on the other hand, appears to have caused major damage across at least five provinces.

    “The scale of what we’re dealing with, I think it’s unprecedented,” Blair said on Sunday.

    “There is going to be… several months’ work in restoring some of the critical infrastructure – buildings and homes, rooftops that have been blown off community centers and schools,” he said.

    Hundreds of thousands of residents across Nova Scotia, PEI, Newfoundland, Quebec and New Brunswick remained without power on Sunday. Blair said hundreds of utility crews had already been deployed to restore power, including some from the United States.

    In Nova Scotia, police urged people to stop going for fast food because drive-thru lines “are blocking roadways, which is impeding recovery efforts” and the situation is prompting calls to police dispatchers “who are already handling very high call volumes”, according to a statement on Twitter.

    In PEI there were long lines at gas stations as many had to fill generators, and several communities were told to boil water before drinking because water purification systems were offline.

    Officials warned on Sunday that in some cases it would take weeks before essential services are fully restored.

    The storm also severely damaged fishing harbors in Atlantic Canada, which could hurt the country’s C$3.2 billion lobster industry, unless it is fully restored before the season kicks off in few weeks.

    “Those fishers have a very immediate need to be able to access their livelihood once the storm passes,” Dominic LeBlanc, minister of intergovernmental affairs of Canada, said on Saturday.

    ($1 = 1.3589 Canadian dollars)

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    Reporting John Morris in Stephenville; Additional reporting by Steve Scherer in Ottawa, Denny Thomas in Toronto, and Eric Martyn in Halifax; Writing by Steve Scherer; Editing by Daniel Wallis, Lisa Shumaker and Diane Craft

    Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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