Damage caused by Cyclone Fani, which made landfall in the Indian state of Odisha on Thursday before moving over Bangladesh on Saturday as it worked its way further and further inland (losing strength and eventually dissipating as it did so), became clearer Sunday.
What emerges from the damage assessment carried out by different agencies like WDB is that although the country may well afford itself a sigh of relief at the low casualty figure and limited destruction of infrastructure and crops, hundreds if not thousands have still been pushed into insecurity and uncertainty for the foreseeable future.
In Khulna, 100 kilometres out of 1600 kilometers of the town protection dam, just above 6 percent of the total, lie damaged in the wake of Fani. Caretaker Engineer of the Water Development Board (WDB) Abul Hossain said the 100-kilometre damaged portion was across 32 polders in Khulna, Bagerhat and Satkhira.
Damage to the protection dam leaves residents extremely vulnerable to flooding. Fani may have passed, but this time of the year is ripe for cyclones originating in the northern Bay of Bengal, which also means the monsoon season is not far away.
That is why locals were pressed into an emergency repair effort at 45 spots across the three districts: 15 in Khulna, 22 in Saatkhira and 8 in Bagerhat. As of Sunday evening, the riskiest or most vulnerable point along the dam was said to be at Angtihara, in Koyra upazila.
The Khulna DC’s office meanwhile adds that some 4640 homes were damaged as Fani swept over the district mainly across three upazilas – Dacope, Koyra and Batiaghata. More than a fifth of those – 990 – are said to have been ‘completely destroyed’.
Assuming each of these homes housed a single family, and it will more often be in excess of that, that still means a thousand families, or a good 4-5,000 people considering the average size of a family in Bangladesh, who were rendered homeless by Fani. Just in Khulna.
Yet in the District Administration’s Control Room for disaster response, the sense of relief was palpable at the fact that Khulna, the most populous of the 20-odd districts of Bangladesh that fell in Cyclone Fani’s path, suffered no casualties.
Officials succeeded in moving some 252,000 (2 lakh 52 thousand) people into 325 purpose-built cyclone shelters and 500 educational institutes serving as temporary one, in Khulna. People started moving on the Monday prior to the storm hitting, a good three days before landfall.
It spoke to the sense of pragmatism that now prevails in how people choose to deal with natural disasters. That helps to make the officials’ task easier. Across Bangladesh, 1.6 million people, or 1 percent of the entire population, spent Fani’s most dangerous hours in such shelters.
Remarkably, that number exceeds those that India managed to evacuate from its danger areas, despite their significantly larger exposure in terms of how many people were resident in the storm’s expected pathway, besides being the country of landfall.
Dacope Upazila Nirbahi Officer (UNO) Abdul Wadud said each union was allotted three tonnes of rice and dry foods (the shelters serve food) almost immediately after Fani formed and was first observed through satellite imagery deep in the Bay. more than 1 week ago. That such multitudes can seek and find refuge throughout a consistent and non-discriminatory network, and then return home once the danger has passed without any untoward incident reported from a single centre, of note, is itself an impressive feat of mobilisation.
Ten years to the month since Khulna was ravaged by the fearsome Cyclone Aila, today perhaps we can finally allow ourselves a moment to submit: with all the real life experience now under our belt, maybe we’ve just become very good at dealing with disasters.
