Floods force 300,000 in Bangladesh to take refuge in relief shelters

Nearly 300,000 Bangladeshis were taking refuge in emergency shelters Saturday from floods that inundated vast areas of the low-lying South Asian country, disaster officials said.

The floods were triggered by heavy monsoon rains and have killed at least 42 people in Bangladesh and India since the start of the week, many in landslides.

"My house is completely inundated," Lufton Nahar, 60, told AFP from a relief shelter in Feni, one of the worst-hit districts near the border with India's Tripura state. "Water is flowing above our roof. My brother brought us here by boat. If he hadn't, we would have died."


The nation is crisscrossed by hundreds of rivers and has seen frequent floods in recent decades. Monsoon rains cause widespread destruction every year but climate change is shifting weather patterns and increasing extreme weather events.

Highways and rail lines were damaged between the capital Dhaka and the main port city of Chittagong, making access to badly flooded districts difficult and disrupting business activity. The flooding also comes just weeks after a student-led revolution toppled its government.

Among the worst affected areas is Cox's Bazar, a district home to around a million Rohingya refugees from neighbouring Myanmar. Another 18 had been killed in Bangladesh, according to disaster management ministry secretary Md Kamrul Hasan. "285,000 people are living in emergency shelters," he said, adding that 4.5 million people in total had been affected.