Bangladeshis are now trying to recover from another national disaster—and for the second time this year.

The country suffered two severe floods in August, which affected 10 million people. And now, the damage wreaked by Cyclone Sidr has left more than 3,000 dead and over three million completely homeless.

Michael Leung takes us on a tour through the affected areas.

The massive clean-up job has begun.

Villagers are using handsaws and axes to cut their way out of the chaos.

Cyclone Sidr left a trail of total destruction. Aside from 250 km/hour winds, the cyclone created a massive tidal surge from the Bay of Bengal.

In some places, a 12-foot wave hit the shore. Entire villages bordering the rivers and coasts were flattened.

“During the storm, I took my son to a safer place, and when I came back I saw my mother, under a tree, dead.”

As you move towards the coast, the devastation becomes worse and worse.
Trees lie toppled across houses, shops, buildings and village paths–making the delivery of aid very difficult.

The majority of village homes are made of corrugated tin and bamboo.

Some homes were blown completely into nearby village ponds.

At a relief distribution center in Pirojpur, hundreds of people are crowded around, waiting for relief handouts. Their faces filled with shock, despair and hunger.

Across the affected areas, hundreds of people are streaming to relief centers like this one to collect food and water.

The second stage of the relief effort will begin soon.

Paul Risley, a spokesperson of the World Food Programme, says that more resources will be required to avert the ensuing humanitarian disaster.

“The next wave is 10 days later–when families are unable to return to decent shelter, they’re unable to find clean uncontaminated drinking water, they’re unable to replace the nutrient value of food for their children and their families, because they don’t have the livelihoods and the assets they had before the cyclone struck and they don’t have the access to decent health care. And now is the time when they need those critical features.”

The rehabilitation of victims will take months. This cyclone is not the first, nor will it be the last.

Md. Alamgir Hossain is cutting wood to build a makeshift shelter.

So far, he’s hammered together enough pieces of corrugated iron to cover his family of five from the open sky.

He claims he received no warning that a cyclone was about to hit.

“A storm came first. Then the water came afterwards. My children and I swam to a tree and held on. My children were 20 feet up in the tree, trying not to drown.”

But during the three days preceding the cyclone, government warnings were supposedly broadcast to people in villages across the south.

Warnings were printed in newspapers and broadcast on television.

Volunteers used loudspeakers in villages to broadcast the message. Many heard the warnings and fled to cyclone shelters.

As a result, the loss of human life was greatly reduced. In 1991, 143,000 people were killed by a cyclone of similar magnitude.

Sifatullah is a student from the village of Pashtanbaria. He says he nearly drowned when the tidal surge hit his home.

“The village have heavy damage, huge damage. Some few minutes I was underwater. That was very dangerous moment for me, I thought I’m gone and I thought I’m underwater and this is the final time of my life.”

Many remote villages say they were totally unprepared for a disaster of this magnitude.

The government claims people heard the warnings but they simply ignored them. But Sifat believes a better way of educating people needs to found.

“The local people are not conscious, the maximum persons are not conscious. They are away from televisions and radios of mass media.”

Bangladesh is no stranger to natural disasters.

Earlier this year, over 10 million people were affected when the country suffered two bouts of flooding over a period of six weeks.

At that time, the country’s interim government was caught largely unaware by the scope of the flooding—despite the fact the last major flood was only three years ago.

This time around, the long-term issue is the same: Good governance has not existed for decades in Bangladesh.

As a result, there are no decent hospitals or medical facilities in the affect areas. When a disaster strikes, there is much more suffering without food, water or warmth.

And it’s the poorest that are often hit the hardest.

“Many of your concerns that the given prior warning, some unions claim that they didn’t receive any warning at all. That is a real call for better communication at the local levels and a better sense of entitlement and power for these communities to ensure that this sort of thing doesn’t happen here.”

While these questions are set to be debated for many months to come, what matters now for victims like Hossain is that the relief effort must speed up.

“Now? I cannot do anything. I have nowhere to sleep and my children are in trouble. It’s wintertime and very cold at night. We have absolutely nothing here. No food and no water.”