1,000 Killed by Typhoon in Bangladesh

DHAKA, Bangladesh — A powerful typhoon battered densely populated Bangladesh for more than eight hours Tuesday, killing at least 1,000 people and leaving millions homeless. About 5,000 fishermen were reported missing.

State-run television said at least 800 people were killed in the coastal districts of Cox’s Bazar, Noakhali and Bhola when 20-foot waves whipped up by 145-m.p.h. winds swept ashore.

The storm out of the Bay of Bengal left more than 250 other people dead on low-lying coastal islands and in the port of Chittagong, the federal Relief Ministry reported. Because of severed communications, there was no word from several remote islands that are home to thousands of people.

Prime Minister Khaleda Zia called an emergency meeting of her Cabinet to discuss relief measures. She said the typhoon caused $1 billion worth of damage and appealed for international help.

Relief officials said about 3 million people in this poor country bordered by India and Myanmar were evacuated from flimsy mud-and-straw homes in the path of the storm before the typhoon struck.

About 80% of the huts were blown away, the Relief Ministry official said.

“The deaths would have been on a much larger scale” if the residents had not been shifted to shelters, he said.

Many were moved to concrete buildings on higher ground that were converted to shelters after a storm packing 138-m.p.h. winds struck the same area in 1970.

The 1970 typhoon claimed almost 500,000 lives in Bangladesh, a low-lying tropical country on the delta of the Ganges, Brahmaputra and Meghna rivers. The country’s 110 million people earn an average of $170 a year and are among the world’s poorest.

United News of Bangladesh said at least 5,000 fishermen aboard 500 trawlers were unaccounted for. It said their boats were at sea when the typhoon struck the southeastern coast where about 7 million people live in 2,000 villages.