Disasters Trail of Tears and Anguish

By Pico Iyer.

"It was a hot, humid day and overcast," recalled Yakub Ali, a 40-year-old farmer on the tiny Bangladeshi island of Urirchar. "First came the dark and the menacing clouds. Soon the wind started whistling ominously. Then the heavy rains began to fall." At first Yakub thought with relief that the torrents might disperse the stifling heat, which can exceed 100 degrees F at this time of year. But the downpour quickly gained greater and still greater force. As the alarmed farmer walked out of his hut, he came upon his neighbors gathering in the night. There was frightened talk that Danger Signal No. 9, a cyclone warning calling for immediate evacuation, had been announced on the radio. It was news to Yakub.

On the previous day, Indian meteorologists had alerted the Bangladesh government in Dhaka that a killer storm was sweeping toward the country's myriad offshore islets and southern flatlands along the Bay of Bengal. Danger Signals Nos. 4 and 5, warning of winds racing above 50 m.p.h., had been hoisted in the port of Chittagong, and fishermen and other sailors had been urged to stay close to the shore. Hourly warnings were broadcast on state-run radio and television, advising residents in the imperiled areas to seek shelter instantly. But most of the impoverished squatters who crowd the islets are too poor to own radios, and many of those who heard the warnings may have shrugged them off as a false alarm.

As wind and water gathered force, however, Yakub Ali knew that something ominous was on the way. Hurrying back to his homestead, he awoke his wife, his ten-year-old son and his younger brother and urged them to come along to Urirchar's only concrete building, a two-story Forestry Department complex a little more than half a mile away. By then the tide had begun to rise. Yakub and his family started running; all around them people were racing for safety.

A few minutes later, still hundreds of yards from the Forestry building, Yakub felt himself lifted by a towering wave. Frantically he looked around for his family, but all was lost in the darkness, behind blinding sheets of rain. "Everything was dark -- rain, rain. I was floating for several hours," he recalled of the hours he passed at sea before sailors from a naval vessel pulled him to safety. "I am a good swimmer, but it was terrible. I really do not know how I survived. And where," he asked, tears in his eyes, "where are my near and dear ones?"

The same sad question haunted all of Urirchar after the night of the raging elements. While the sea crashed over the 20-sq.-mi. island, whose highest point is only 10 ft. above sea level, families were torn asunder. In desperation, people clung to the rafters of the Forestry Department building or to trees or to anything else not swept away by the terrifying storm. "I survived by holding on to a branch," said Akmal Hossain, a 42-year-old farmer. "Everything happened after midnight, and before I could realize the gravity of the situation, water and water engulfed the island." By the time furious wind and swirling wave had passed, Hossain found that he had lost his wife, his daughter and his aged mother.

For seven hours, through the dead of night, the screaming winds whipped across the Bay of Bengal at up to 100 m.p.h., pushing before them a thunderous storm surge that crested as high as 50 ft. On Char Clarke, an islet seven miles southwest of Urirchar, Ali Ahmed, 46, first heard the wind gusting violently during the early part of the night and saw the mangroves swaying wildly. As island elders huddled around a radio, trees and whole huts began crashing to the earth around them. Finally the huge tidal surge ravaged the settlement, submerging all except those who managed to struggle their way to the safety of a few brick buildings. Ahmed was relatively lucky: he lost only one of his five children.

By the time dawn came and the murderous storm had headed farther north, the afflicted area was stripped clean. Thatched huts and small shops, animals and people had been swept beneath the waves; thousands of fishing boats had vanished. Whole settlements had been swamped or washed into the sea. Across the length and breadth of Urirchar there hung an eerie silence, broken now and then by the wails of survivors. Only a few houses remained, among them the Forestry Department building. Of some 10,000 residents of the islet, mostly peasant farmers and a few shopkeepers, up to 7,000 were dead or missing. The flat, wet land was dotted with corpses and the carcasses of cattle; vultures and crows feasted. Upon the muddy waves of the Bay of Bengal floated hundreds upon hundreds of blackened, bloated bodies.

The great cyclone devastated seven districts in southern Bangladesh in all and affected nearly half the 10 million people who live in the area. At week's end relief officials estimated that between 15,000 and 20,000 people, many of them children, had perished; thousands were injured and a quarter of a million left homeless. With so many simply washed away by the storm's fury, and with at least 400 sparsely populated chars, or tiny islands, still cut off from the mainland, it was assumed that the final death toll could double.

For almost every one of its 14 years as an independent nation, Bangladesh has been buffeted by fatal storms and floods and famine. The latest tempest, however, was the worst since 1970, when another killer cyclone took more than half a million lives in the same area.

In the wake of the tragedy, the entire country was stunned into shock and silence. Proclaiming a day of national mourning, Bangladesh's President, Lieut. General Hussain Mohammad Ershad, postponed a planned state visit to China and hurried to Urirchar. After traveling through winds so fierce that his helicopter had to land before continuing, the President gave drinking water and biscuits to a few children, handed out clothes and looked on as bodies were buried. He could find no words adequate to the tragedy. "The devastation," he said simply, "is beyond description."

In the days that followed, the country struggled to resuscitate itself. Ershad established a special relief coordinating committee headed by his second-in-command, Rear Admiral Sultan Ahmed, and ordered Bangladesh's 150,000-man armed forces put on a "wartime footing" to help cope with the disaster. Some 20,000 military personnel and 50,000 civilians were enlisted for relief operations. The President also appealed to other nations for $50 million in emergency aid; he specifically requested cash rather than supplies, so that the stricken could be given immediate relief. "So many of the survivors have lost everything," he said. "I appeal to the whole world to help."

The plea was quickly answered. The International Red Cross set about raising $2 million for reconstruction, clothing, food and medicine. King Fahd of Saudi Arabia sent $4 million in cash and ordered the dispatch to Bangladesh of 30,000 tons of wheat, tents, blankets and medical aid. Japan pledged $1.2 million, Pakistan $1 million in relief supplies. The U.S. promised $575,000 in emergency assistance and said that more would be made available as the situation warranted; the United Nations made available $500,000. Other sizable pledges came from the European Community, the West German Red Cross and Britain.

One of Bangladesh's next-door neighbors, India, also was quick to announce its support. After committing $10 million, along with medical personnel and food, to the stricken land, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi scheduled a visit to Bangladesh to express his sympathy and to tour the ravaged areas. Sri Lankan President J.R. Jayewardene, who was due to hold talks with Gandhi, promised to come too, in a show of "South Asian solidarity."

Of all nations, Bangladesh can least afford such a tragedy. Three months ago, a World Bank survey described the country as the world's poorest, with an average annual per capita income of only $130. Two-thirds of its people live below the poverty line. In addition, Bangladesh is one of the most densely populated nations on earth: 96 million people -- more than four times the population of California -- are crammed into an area the size of Wisconsin. The cyclone aggravated already serious problems. It shattered much of the economic fabric of Bangladesh's coastal areas, leaving at least 30,000 cattle dead, about 3,000 sq. mi. of cropland ravaged, vital fishing grounds wasted. It also left tens of thousands of subsistence farmers both shelterless and penniless.

Over the past 2 1/2 decades, more than 32 cyclones, the Indian Ocean's equivalents of the hurricanes of the Atlantic and the typhoons of the Pacific, have boiled out of the moist, hot air over the Bay of Bengal to sweep across Bangladesh. With its wide-open flatlands and labyrinthine waterways sprinkled with hundreds of chars (tiny islands created by silt deposits from the rivers and tributaries that empty into the bay and shift as the water level changes), southern Bangladesh is especially vulnerable to the attacks of great tropical tempests. Seven of the world's ten most destructive killer storms on record have ripped through the Bay of Bengal.

The power of the cyclones is concentrated into a narrow path by the bay's triangular shape. Wide at the bottom and narrow at the top, it funnels the cyclones as they rumble northward from the Indian Ocean, building up ferocious tides. Generally born during the hottest time of the year (which around the Bay of Bengal is in the spring or fall), a storm system begins to build as heated, moist air is sucked north into the bay. The hot-air mass rises, creating an updraft. When the air inside the system cools, its moisture condenses into rain, releasing heat, which in turn sends more hot air upward with ever greater velocity.

As the process continues, the earth's rotation causes the column of rising air to spiral. Fueled by a constant supply of hot tropical air, the storm feeds on itself, generating roaring winds that swirl around its "eye." When the system reaches cooler and dryer air on land, it begins to lose force. By then, however, the storm may have released energy equivalent to that of about 9 million Hiroshima-type atom bombs.

Despite the ever present threat of raging cyclones, poor farmers from Bangladesh's overpopulated mainland have continued streaming onto the little islands in the Ganges delta in the hope of finding cultivable land. So far, the government has been reluctant to turn back the human tide, and unable to evacuate the chars before a cyclone roars through. Government advisories, officials in Dhaka claimed last week, enabled thousands of peasants to scramble to safety before the most recent cyclone struck. Yet at least 1.2 million of those caught in the maelstrom had no idea in advance that the whirlwind was on its way.

The government also failed to inspire confidence in the immediate aftermath of the catastrophe. Even as local newspapers were estimating the death toll at more than 15,000, Dhaka by week's end officially reported just over 2,000 fatal- ities. At the national cyclone center in the capital, authorities simply said that they had lost touch with many of the islands and that there was little hope for their residents.

As the weather began to clear, rescue teams managed at last to take to the waters and pick up survivors. At least 4,000 men, women and children were saved; many of them had clung to floating bamboo rooftops or pieces of driftwood. One 14-year-old girl clutched a piece of timber for 18 hours before she was pulled to safety. A man was said to have held on to his wooden bed for two days before a vessel found him.

For every person saved, however, several others were lost. "We fear that many bodies may have drifted out to sea, making it impossible to recover them," said a navy spokesman. Some of those who were rescued died later of exposure or shock. Even those who endured every one of the dangers found scant relief after the storm had passed. In a relief camp in Urirchar, Taslim Ali wished to do nothing but mourn his lost son. "How can I live in this world?" he asked again and again and again. Elsewhere, a boy, saved after he had seen both his parents and his younger sister drowned, lost his mind.

With each passing day, those marooned on the islands faced new perils. Virtually all buildings had been leveled, all roads and bridges destroyed; most of the survivors had no shelter, no clothing, no medicine, no food. There was little fresh water, and many were forced to drink a salty brine that had been exposed to the elements and was probably polluted by decomposing bodies. The corpses were ubiquitous. "It was terrible," said Mohammad Taher, who arrived on Urirchar the day after the disaster. "I could not believe what I saw. Bodies were all around. I myself buried at least 40."

The corpses were, to be sure, committed as quickly as possible to mass graves, but by that time they had been lying in the open long enough to arouse fears of epidemics. Only a few days after the storm struck, 40 people were dead of cholera, and others were described as in critical condition. When the first relief teams landed on Urirchar, they tried to inoculate 300 people against typhoid, tetanus and cholera. But the resources at hand were totally inadequate: all the injections had to be given with the same needle because replacements were not available. "We cannot change the needle," said Nurul Islam, a navy medic. "We cannot afford it. God give them resistance."

Gradually, relief supplies began to trickle into the storm-struck areas. But the government was reportedly able to mobilize only five naval vessels to carry food, water and clothes to the stranded. By the time the ships had reached their destinations, having plowed through rain and still heavy seas, many more of the afflicted had died. A few air force helicopters -- Bangladesh has all of 15 -- dropped off water and food. But demand far exceeded supply.

As the full scope of the tragedy sank in, the people of Bangladesh rallied to recover. In the commercial areas of Dhaka and in other towns and cities spared by the storm, students energetically collected money for the homeless, while devout citizens offered gaibana janaza, or prayers for the unburied dead. Government employees contributed a day's pay to help the destitute, and banks and private companies pitched in with relief efforts of their own.

President Ershad set up camp on Urirchar to take control of rescue operations and relief efforts. Nearby, many of the island farmers, having laid their kin to rest, bravely set about rebuilding. Yet even as reconstruction got under way, floods 200 miles away battered the northeastern regions of the ill-starred country and 300,000 more Bangladeshis lost their homes.

On Urirchar late last week the winds were calm and the sea lapped softly against noiseless beaches. But there was little peace -- or hope -- among those who had survived the night of terror. At the ill-equipped local relief camp, 26-year-old Ayesha Begum plaintively told of how she had spent two days searching for the bodies of her husband and two children. She had not found any of them. "Why," asked the widow, fighting back tears, "why is Allah so unkind as to keep me alive?" Her question, like her prayer, was unanswered.

With reporting by Zaglul A. Chowdhury/ Urirchar and K.K. Sharma/New Delhi