Deadly storm hits S. Asia, 50 killed, 800 missing

Deadly storm hits S. Asia, 50 killed, 800 missing

S. Radha Kumar, Reuters/Hyderabad, India

At least 800 people remained missing in southern India on
Wednesday and hundreds of fishermen were unaccounted for in
Bangladesh after a severe storm in the Bay of Bengal killed 50
people, officials said.

Indian authorities said about 100,000 people were homeless
after heavy rains this week caused floods in the coastal
districts of Andhra Pradesh state, with strong winds uprooting
thousands of trees and electricity poles.

They had earlier said more than 1,000 people were missing in
the state, including scores of fishermen, but some of them had
returned to shore.

"Of the over 1,000 missing people, 150-200 fishermen have been
traced and are safe," top state disaster management official
Shashank Goel told Reuters.

He said flood waters had started to recede as rains had eased
in the region.

Rescue workers in motorized rubber dinghies picked up people
stranded in floods, while military helicopters dropped food and
water packets to marooned people and lifted them off rooftops.
Thousands were evacuated to relief camps.

"Water entered my house around midnight on Monday. We lost
everything, including our clothes," Samba Siva Rao, a coastal
resident, told Reuters by telephone from a relief camp.

Most of the 50 killed in Andhra Pradesh were either
electrocuted or died in house collapses, officials said.

In Bangladesh, leaders of the low-lying nation's fishing
community said on Wednesday they had not heard from about 300
fishermen after the storm triggered high waves and heavy rain
along the coast this week.

"We are expecting some of them to come back," Kabir Ahmed
Sawdagar told Reuters from the coastal city of Cox's Bazar,
adding that in the past fishermen reported missing had returned
safely weeks after a storm.

But Golam Mustafa Chowdhury, president of the Fishing Trawlers
Association in the coastal district of Barguna, said 31 trawlers
with about 450 fishermen sank during the storm and he feared most
of the men on them had drowned.

Other fishing groups said some missing fishermen had returned
and others may have been pushed towards Indian waters.

Storms and cyclones that form in the Bay of Bengal in
September and October slam into India's eastern coast and
neighboring Bangladesh almost every year.

In 1977, around 10,000 people were killed when a cyclone
lashed Andhra Pradesh. Nineteen years later, some 2,000 people
were killed in another cyclone. In Bangladesh, a cyclone left
143,000 people dead in 1991.

On Wednesday, there was no electricity in about 100 towns and
1,300 villages on Andhra Pradesh's coast where rail, air and road
traffic has been severely disrupted.

With flood waters beginning to recede, most train services
were expected to resume by Thursday, railway officials said.

Cargo handling at Visakhapatnam port -- one of India's busiest
-- had resumed after being suspended for two days due to the
storm.

Hundreds of vehicles were stranded on a key highway linking
eastern India with the south of the country and the airport in
the port city of Visakhapatnam was closed for the second day as
its runway was still partially waterlogged.

Rains had eased in most parts of the state on Wednesday but
its largest river, the Godavari, had burst its bank in several
areas and was threatening to spill over. Officials said they were
worried about losses to sugarcane, chilli and paddy crops.

"Lakhs (hundreds of thousands) of acres of fields have got
inundated," Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy, Andhra Pradesh's chief
minister, said after a aerial survey of flood-hit areas.