Dhaka, Bangladesh – Ekramul Haque was shocked when his uncle known as him late within the afternoon of August 21 to tell him that floodwaters had inundated their ancestral dwelling in southeastern Bangladesh’s Feni district, near the Indian border.
On the time, Haque was about 10km (6 miles) away within the city of Mirsarai within the Chattogram district, the place he lives together with his spouse and youngsters.
The subsequent day, it took 40 minutes travelling by minibus within the downpour to achieve his village.
“I rushed again to my dwelling the following morning amidst torrential rain. By the point I arrived, knee-deep water had already entered and soaked all the things,” the 29-year-old recounted. “I urged my prolonged household to come back with me to Mirsarai.”
His mother and father and one uncle returned to Mirsarai with him.
However because the heavy rain continued and experiences emerged of floodwaters submerging single-storey houses in his village in Chhagalnaiya Upazila (an upazila is a district subunit), Haque determined to undertake rescue missions beginning on Friday morning to assist different members of the family and residents of the village who have been stranded.
“I contacted just a few buddies from college and fashioned a group to assist. Nonetheless, I used to be shocked to find that the highway from Mirsarai to Chagalnaiya was solely submerged underneath chest-high water, making it utterly impassable on Friday,” he stated.
Delivering aid provides
Haque and his buddies initially tried to assemble a makeshift raft from felled banana timber, however it didn’t float as a result of currents.
They finally managed to rent a small boat at thrice the standard value. “The present was very sturdy, and it took the boatman three hours to navigate us by means of. After we arrived, almost all the homes have been utterly underwater,” Haque instructed Al Jazeera.
The area the place Haque grew up doesn’t at all times expertise annual monsoon floods, in contrast to decrease mendacity components of the nation.
“I don’t recall ever seeing floodwaters rise past ankle-deep in my space earlier than in monsoon. My mother and father talked about that through the main flood of 1988, the water reached knee-deep. This case was past something I’ve ever skilled,” he added, talking by cellphone whereas dropping off support in Chhagalnaiya.
Floods in central, jap and southeastern Bangladesh have killed 23 individuals and affected greater than 5.7 million. About 1.24 million households throughout 11 districts within the nation of 180 million individuals are stranded, reduce off from the remainder of the nation by floodwaters as a consequence of relentless monsoon rains and overflowing rivers.
Because the floodwaters step by step recede, these affected are urgently in want of meals, clear water, medicines and dry clothes. The state of affairs is very crucial in distant areas like Haque’s village, which isn’t near the district city and the place blocked roads have severely impeded rescue and aid efforts.
“We’ve got been working tirelessly to ship pressing aid to these stranded for the previous few days,” Haque stated on Tuesday. “Yesterday, we reached a village the place individuals had been with out meals for 72 hours. Many have been severely unwell with diarrhoea and lacked clear consuming water. It was an unprecedented disaster.”
Anti-Indian sentiment
Bangladesh, positioned on the Ganges-Brahmaputra Delta, which is the world’s largest, has a deep reference to water. Its panorama, characterised by rivers and floodplains, is accustomed to annual monsoon floods, significantly within the low-lying northeastern districts. Residents in these areas are accustomed to this cycle and put together by taking their valuables to family members in areas that aren’t flood-prone and stocking up on meals and water earlier than the heavy rains and flooding that happen every monsoon season.
Bangladesh is without doubt one of the world’s most climate-vulnerable international locations, and about 3.5 million people are at risk of annual river flooding, in keeping with a 2015 World Financial institution Institute evaluation.
However this yr’s floods caught many within the southeast off guard.
In flood-affected districts comparable to Feni, Cumilla and Lakshmipur – areas near the Indian border – many are blaming India, which they stated launched water from the Dumbur Dam within the state of Tripura in the course of final week. India has denied opening the sluice gates.
The dam, a low construction about 30 metres (100ft) excessive, is greater than 120km (75 miles) from the Bangladeshi border. It produces electrical energy that contributes to the grid utilized by Bangladesh and is constructed on the Gumti River, which merges with the Meghna in Bangladesh.
Tripura can be dealing with extreme flooding with 31 individuals reported useless and greater than 100,000 residents displaced into aid camps. Floods and landslides have affected nearly 1.7 million people in India.
Kamrul Hasan Nomani, 41, a resident of Lakshmipur, instructed Al Jazeera that the floodwater is knee-deep in his dwelling and has broken a big a part of it.
He believes that no quantity of rain might have triggered chest-deep water in his village with out the dam opening.
For Nomani, like many affected by the flooding, the disaster has generated anti-Indian sentiment with many believing that India purposefully opened the dam with out warning. “They did it deliberately as a result of their most well-liked authorities, led by [former Prime Minister Sheikh] Hasina, has fallen in Bangladesh,” Nomani alleged.
On August 5 after large student-led protests, Hasina’s 15-year rule came to an abrupt end. Hasina, who was broadly seen as New Delhi’s favoured leader in Bangladesh, sought refuge in India. Anti-India sentiment that existed whereas Hasina was prime minister, fuelled by allegations of Indian interference to keep her in power, has escalated since she fled to India.
India cited extreme rainfall as the reason for the flooding whereas acknowledging that on August 21, a flood-related energy outage and communications failure prevented sending the standard river updates to their neighbours downstream in Bangladesh.
Shafiqul Alam, press secretary for Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate main Bangladesh’s new interim authorities, instructed reporters in Dhaka that Pranay Verma, India’s excessive commissioner to Bangladesh, knowledgeable the interim authorities that the water from the dam was “launched mechanically” as a consequence of elevated ranges.
Sarder Uday Raihan, an govt engineer on the Flood Forecasting and Warning Centre in Bangladesh, instructed Al Jazeera that the company normally will get details about rising water ranges in rivers in India twice a day.
“Nonetheless, this time, India didn’t share any updates. With out correct info, it’s arduous to present an correct flood forecast,” he stated, including that well timed warnings might have helped stop deaths and injury.
Destroyed houses and crops
Mohamad Khalequzzaman, a professor of geology at Lock Haven College in the USA, instructed Al Jazeera that the final flood that inundated districts like Feni, Cumilla or Lakshmipur was in 1988.
“The first reason for this yr’s flooding seems to be uncommon rainfall within the area, however a number of different components have exacerbated the state of affairs,” he defined.
He famous that rainfall from August 20 to Friday ranged from 200 to 493mm (8 to 19.4 inches), in contrast with the standard 120 to 360mm (4.7 to 14.2 inches) in numerous places in Tripura and jap Bangladesh, which he described as unusually “heavy” for that area through the monsoon.
Khalequzzaman added that whereas the sudden launch of dam water throughout an already extreme flood interval could have contributed to flooding within the Gomati River watershed, it’s unlikely to have contributed considerably to flooding in Feni city, Sonagazi and Chhagalnaiya Upazilas as a result of they don’t lie within the river catchment space.
He additional defined that with the soil of the watershed space already saturated, a lot of the rainwater turns into floor run-off, resulting in flooding of close by rivers within the affected districts.
He additionally identified that unplanned urbanisation through the years has led to a build-up of silt, which, together with roads, buildings and embankments, significantly alongside the Gomati and Muhuri rivers, stop floodwaters from receding.
Moreover, he stated, land encroachment by unlawful companies utilizing the Gomati and Feni rivers for transportation, for instance, has destroyed a lot of the pure drainage system in these areas.
“The mixture of torrential rain, disruptions in river stream each in India and Bangladesh, lack of pure drainage, riverbed siltation and impediments to floor stream have all contributed to the extreme flooding,” he stated.
In a still-flooded village in Cumilla, the house of Abdul Matin, a trainer, has been destroyed.
“I’ve misplaced all the things. My corrugated tin home has been washed away. I’m uncertain how I’ll address the monetary devastation brought on by the flood,” Matin stated.
He doesn’t consider the flooding was solely brought on by heavy rainfall and injury to the pure drainage system. “I maintain India answerable for this,” he stated. “This was India’s water.”
Ismail Mridha, a 46-year-old farmer from Sonagazi Upazila in Feni, instructed Al Jazeera that the flood devastated each his dwelling and farmland. “My home, fabricated from mud and corrugated tin, has been utterly destroyed, and the farmland the place I grew eggplant and bottle gourd has been washed away,” he stated.
“I survived the flood, however I’m unsure how I’ll handle to recuperate from the monetary devastation.”